The Demo for This Year’s Most Exciting RPG Lets You Craft Toothless Warriors and Cat Girls
Why even save the world if you can’t do it in style?
There’s no better way to build anticipation for a big game than releasing a demo beforehand. While some players might give it a shot and decide the game isn’t their cup of tea, it also lets the most rabid fans share their experiences early to whip up excitement. And for players, it’s a good way to pass the time getting immersed in the game’s world before diving into the full thing. Or, as is the case with the new Dragon’s Dogma 2 demo, it at least lets you spend hours obsessing over your character.
While some demos, like the recent one for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, let you play through a major story moment and carry that progress into the game, Dragon’s Dogma 2 offers something far more important — the ability to tweak your avatar to perfection two full weeks before release. The demo consists solely of the game’s character creator, letting you make both your main character and their pawn NPC companion, then import them into the full game when it launches. And given how good the character creator is, you might want to take full advantage of that.
There’s tons of variety in how you can build characters in Dragon’s Dogma 2.
In the Dragon’s Dogma 2 character creator, you can pick from a preset character or a blank slate, and either way, you’re free to change them however you see fit. Whichever route you go, there’s also a three-step menu to choose a preset head, then pick from different variations of it that seem to fit multiple character concepts from “battle-scarred warrior” to “raven-haired witch who somehow has a lot of time to do makeup on the road.” It’s a great little starting point that lets you begin with a character close to what you’re imagining then tweak them to your heart’s content.
From there, you can adjust all the parameters you’d expect in an RPG, with granular options for every aspect of the character’s face and body. It also dodges many of the pitfalls of similar character creators, and character designs in general. Dragon’s Dogma 2’s customization options offer good body diversity for anyone who doesn’t want to play the kind of outrageously buff heroes that usually grace RPGs. Judging from reactions online, players are also pretty happy with the Black hairstyles and skin tones on offer, which character creators are often abysmal at. Hopefully, all of this will be represented in the game’s NPCs as well.
You can get as obsessively detailed as you want while crafting your characters.
But aside from just doing typical character creator options right, Dragon’s Dogma 2 also lets you get pretty weird with it. There’s plenty of room for Monster Factory-esque creations, but even in subtler ways, there are some fairly strange tweaks available, like the ability to choose how much dirt your character is caked in. My personal favorite is the option to remove a character’s front few teeth, if you want to accurately role-play the likely state of dental care in the medieval fantasy world of Dragon’s Dogma 2.
Then there are the cat people. Dragon’s Dogma 2 adds the Beastren, humanoid cats that make up one of the game’s primary civilizations. You can make your character or your pawn a Beastren, and they come with fully featured options of their own, like fur lengths and patterns including tiger stripes and leopard spots. I spent some time trying to recreate my own cats as an adventuring party, but it’ll take a bit more work to get their perfect little faces right. Plus, the thought of my semi-feral kittens being bipedal and wielding greatswords strikes genuine fear into my heart.
It’s easy to imagine how I could spend several more hours in character creation, which is why it’s so great that this demo came out now. Open-world RPGs often launch with great character creators that get ignored in the rush to get to the actual game. It’s happened to me plenty of times. I spend a little time screwing around with the character creator, but in my eagerness to start playing, I end up abandoning my masterpiece halfway through. Or there’s the case of the Nioh 2 demo, which featured an extremely flexible character creator but was only playable for a few days. I spent the entire time the demo was available crafting my perfect character and ran out of time to actually try the game.
Even the new cat people get plenty of options in Dragon’s Dogma 2.
I’m a real Dragon’s Dogma sicko, having spent hundreds of hours in the original game across multiple playthroughs. If I spend even a fraction of that time in the sequel, I want to do it with a main character and pawn I really love. Or more realistically, several main characters and pawns I really love. Dragon’s Dogma 2 lets you choose between four starting classes, and at the final step of character creation, you choose one and see your avatar in their starting equipment. The demo offers five save slots each for main characters and pawns, meaning you could plan out five entire playthroughs before the game even launches.
Would I have liked to see a demo that lets me actually set foot in the game’s open world? Sure. I’m impatient. But Dragon’s Dogma 2 will be here soon enough. By getting a chance to do nothing but mold a character to my liking early, I’m able to engage with a part of the game I may have been too hasty to experience otherwise. There will be plenty of time to slay dragons and save the kingdom later. For now, I’m embarking on another, equally important quest — designing the sword lesbian of my dreams to play as along the way.
