Dragon's Dogma

Do you still play Dragon's Dogma or Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen on Xbox 360? If so, hello, both of you. Capcom has bad news.

UPDATE 11.40am: It sounds like we'll be seeing Dragon's Dogma on PS4 and Xbox One here in the UK as well. Capcom UK has just pointed us to this new Twitter post:

UPDATE: Well, that didn't last long. Capcom isn't about to announce a new Dragon's Dogma, it turns out, with the announcement instead pertaining to a mobile app aimed towards young girls. A leak on Famitsu, picked up by Siliconera, helped clear up the situation a little.

ORIGINAL STORY: Is Capcom going to announce an all-new Dragon's Dogma next Tuesday? A teaser for the enigmatically titled 'Project Palm' has just emerged, and the single-shot of a light-scarred hand has been enough to get some hopes up over on NeoGAF where links have been made to Capcom's much-loved action RPG which recently got the remaster treatment on PC.

There's certainly reason for some hope - the pawns within Dragon's Dogma, emotionless characters that follow the player character and are central to the game's plot, carry marks across their palms that look awfully similar to that featured in the teaser image - but as ever it's best to exercise some caution. After all, mobile games also fit perfectly in the palm of your hand, so this could be far from a full-blown Dragon's Dogma sequel.

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Dragon's Dogma finally comes to PC three years after the game first hit Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and arguably Capcom needs to deliver more than a straightforward port to justify such a late release. Previously, we've seen high some high profile Japanese titles poorly converted over to PC, with resolutions capped below 720p and frame-rates limited to 30fps - an experience well below the standard expected for a PC release. Thankfully, none of these issues are present with Dragon Dogma: Dark Arisen and Capcom delivers a largely excellent conversion that fits the bill as a full-on HD remaster.

Rather than seeing a straightforward port, Capcom has taken the time improve much of the game's texture work, along with reducing the aggressiveness of the level of detail (LOD) set-up, resulting in a more refined presentation that manages to hold up in 2016. Of course, resolution plays a large part in providing a substantial leap in graphical quality over the 720p console releases, and on PC making the jump to native 1080p and higher with decent quality anti-aliasing delivers a substantial increase in sharpness and clarity across the game's medieval-styled visuals. In this case, choosing the FXAA3 HQ option provides excellent coverage and doesn't smooth over texture details. By comparison, the 720p last-gen console versions appear rather murky by comparison and this isn't helped by the use of a low quality post-process AA solution that introduces visible blurring over the artwork.

The PC version is a substantial step up in this area, and the boost in resolution helps to bring out as much detail as possible from the revised assets. Rather than simply roll out the console artwork here, higher resolution textures and normal maps are deployed across characters and the environment throughout the game. This adds more intricate details to clothing and brickwork, along with more incidental objects that are scattered across the landscape.

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A trademark for something called Dragon's Dogma Online has been spotted on the OHIM (Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market) website.

Capcom is preparing to slash its European operation by more than half, according to the UK trade magazine MCV. "More than half of the European arm faces redundancy, with a number of jobs set to merge," reads the report.

Capcom's annual financial results are in, and everything the company predicted in its April forecast pretty much came true.

The recent title update for open world fantasy role-playing game Dragon's Dogma has been found to corrupt game saves, Capcom has warned.

In some cases the patch caused Dragon's Dogma and Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen save date to become corrupted, meaning the game will no longer save or load progress, the company wrote in a post on Capcom Unity.

It suggested players copy their existing save data to an external storage device or the cloud whenever possible, "especially if you are picking up the game for the first time in awhile or switching over to Dark Arisen for the first time".

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It's an expandalone.

Dragon's Dogma expansion Dark Arisen arrives 26th April in Europe, Capcom has announced.

It's a standalone game that contains loads of new stuff as well as the original, full, Dragon's Dogma game.

Dark Arisen will cost £20, and will be released on and as a download on PS3 and Xbox 360. (On PS3 it will be a simultaneous box and digital release; on Xbox 360 the disc will come first at the Games on Demand version "in the summer".)

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Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen - the "major expansion" to Capcom's open-world fantasy action game - will allow the option to play with Japanese voice-overs, due to fan request.

Dragon's Dogma's hard mode and speedrun mode will be released on 4th December, Capcom has announced.

Capcom has reconfirmed to Eurogamer that it has no plans for Dragon's Dogma on PC after the company appeared to confirm the opposite on Twitter.

A message on the official Capcom UK Twitter account stated "It's coming" to a fan asking about the possibility of a PC version.

Apparently this should have said "It's not coming."

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Capcom has announced Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, a "major expansion" to its mythical beast-slaying role-player.

Dark Arisen will arrive sometime next year for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

No other details were given, except that players will be able to carry save data over to the expansion.

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Capcom's annual report is out, and one of the big ideas for the future is to shorten development cycles and pump out sequels more often.

Gulp.

Capcom president and COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto put it best:

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Dragon's Dogma sales are 1.05 million, according to Capcom's bright and cheery April-June 2012 financial report.

Capcom has promised to release more Dragon's Dogma games.

Square Enix role-player Dragon Quest Monsters: Terry no Wonderland 3D has stormed the Japanese software chart, selling more than 500,000 copies in its first week on sale.

Do Capcom's MT Framework games really tear more badly with the dash set to full HD?

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Xbox 360

PlayStation 3

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Screen tear on Xbox 360 impacts image quality in this head-to-head video.

Frame-rate tests of the Capcom RPG on PS3 and 360 during intense combat and boss fights.

Like-for-like scenes analysed in the Xbox 360 and PS3 version's of Dragon's Dogma.

Capcom's MT Framework RPG compared on 360 and PS3 as the player moves from location to location.

Capcom's action RPG Dragon's Dogma has roared into the weekly Japanese sales chart at number one.

Sci-fi shooter Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier has shot to the top of the UK all-format charts, beating Max Payne 3, last week's number one.

Eurogamer explores Capcom's massive new RPG.

Dragon's Dogma is a game soundtracked by screaming guitars and a hyperactive orchestra; a game whose story is told with showboating faux-Shakespearean flourish; a game set within acres of countryside scrawled with boastful castles; a game fronted by a hero whose heart has been plucked from his chest by a dragon's fingernails. Despite all of this, it is also a game that understands the value of understatement.

For years, video games have aped cinema's love of the action set-piece, with critical fights telegraphed to viewers with grim ceremony. Warriors exchange worried glances as the string section falls silent; a tumbleweed tumbles as the party stands frozen in fight/flight uncertainty; an inhale of calm before the storm.

But Dragon's Dogma's set-piece battles have none of this. They occur brutally unannounced - truer to life perhaps, if life consisted of wandering through a dense forest patrolled by a two-ton Chimera. Midway through a routine battle with a band of goblins, a red wyrm might crash awkwardly through the tree canopy, breaking trunks like twigs as it tries to stow its wings while breathing fire. This sense that any monster could arrive on the scene at any moment lends the game a fraught tension.

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Capcom is "re-evaluating" its on-disc DLC policy.

There's an awful lot riding on Resident Evil 6 - Capcom expects the upcoming survival horror to ship a whopping 7 million copies.

Upcoming Capcom role-player Dragon's Dogma will include an event mode, allowing players to fight the mighty Ur-Dragon via Xbox Live or PlayStation Network when the game launches on 25th May.

Pawn cocktail.

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The Dragon's Dogma releases next week, Capcom has announced.

You can download it from Xbox Live Marketplace and from the US PlayStation Store on Tuesday 24th April. It goes live a day later, on Wednesday, 25th April, on the European PlayStation Store.

In the demo you can play as two of the game's character classes, the Fighter and the Strider, in two encounters. You also have a party of three Pawns. The Fighter encounter is a Prologue quest set before the events of the main game. The Strider quest is set in the open plains surrounding the capital of Gransys. Both end with a big bad boss fight.

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Stop me if you've heard this one before. A terrible dragon has returned to a blighted kingdom, leaving its citizens superstitious and frightened. To challenge this resurrected threat comes just one person - you, as it happens - destined from birth to battle the monster.

You may be called the Arisen rather than Dragonborn, and you may be defying one dragon rather than many, but you sense it's still going to be hard for some players to see past the surface similarities with Bethesda's all-conquering Skyrim when the time comes for Capcom to sell their vast openworld adventure on the merits of its story.

This is a tricky time for a third-person RPG to stand out. Not only does the brutal spectre of Dark Souls still hover over the genre, setting a gruelling standard in player expectation, but any new entry must also fight for attention against the likes of Kingdoms of Amalur, The Witcher 2 and Risen 2. Luckily for Capcom, Dragon's Dogma has a secret weapon: porn.

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Capcom is hoping to sell 10 million copies of forthcoming fantasy RPG Dragon's Dogma, according to producer Hideaki Itsuno.

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A Dragon's Dogma demo will launch on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in Europe, Capcom has confirmed.

With it you can create your own character and main Pawn using the character creation tool, and, usefully, carry them over into the full game when it launches on 25th May.

The demo includes two of the game's character classes and two encounters. Pick the Fighter, the game's melee specialist, and you battle through underground tunnels before fighting the Chimera in a Prologue quest set before the events of the main game.

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Buy Capcom open world fantasy game Dragon's Dogma and you'll be the first to play the Resident Evil 6 demo.

Kill or injure innocents in upcoming open world fantasy game Dragon's Dogma and you suffer a penalty to your charisma, according to the game's ESRB rating summary.

There are two dragon-heavy open world fantasy role-playing games on the horizon: Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and Capcom's Dragon's Dogma.

After all the talk of Monster Hunter and Demon's Souls, all the footage of giant beasts being tackled in majestic battles, it's quite a surprise to sit through the first couple of hours of Dragon's Dogma and realise what this actually is: an extremely traditional, noticeably Western roleplaying game.

It's set in a wide open fantasy world, which stretches from the sandy shores to mountainous regions, and walking from place to place promises lengthy, tempestuous journeys. The enormous monsters the game has already become known for are conspicuously absent: only one appears during our demo time, and it doesn't stick around for long.

Capcom have never made a secret of Dragon's Dogma's status as an open-world RPG, but it's interesting to see just how close to the standard formula the game sticks. Its universe is Oblivion, it's Two Worlds and it's Risen - it's places you've seen on countless occasions before, pieced together to create something whose only real identity is in how it combines the lot. And of all the quests you'll undertake throughout the game's duration, only a small percentage concern the slaying of gargantuan monsters.

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Up your follower count.

Capcom's monster hunter out next year.

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Capcom RPG conjures cursed forest.

You've got to feel sorry for new IP: we bleat for it all the time, then Capcom whips the covers off its first-ever open world game, a titan-slaying adventure of breathtaking scope. And then people say "Monster Hunter meets Demon's Souls, innit."

Archer glad?

Chimera and have a look.

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Flaming new images blast in.

Fancy stepping into the fantasy world of upcoming action role-playing game Dragon's Dogma for real? No problem.

Capcom has high hopes for its upcoming games.

It's projected big sales for Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City, Street Fighter x Tekken, Dragon's Dogma and Dead Rising 2 Off the Record.

Third-person co-op and competitive shooter Resident Evil Operation Raccoon City will shift 2.5 million units worldwide, Capcom reckons.

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Fighter! Strider! Mage!

Capcom has announced its first open world game: Dragon's Dogma.

The Japanese company has assembled its largest ever development team to work on the new IP, and put Devil May Cry 4 producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi and Devil May Cry 4 director Hideaki Itsuno at the helm.

Dragon's Dogma is being built using the latest version of the MT Framework game engine, which was used to power Resident Evil 5 and Lost Planet 2. Development began two years ago. It launches for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2012.

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Let's be honest. We've never asked ourselves, what if Capcom's Devil May Cry team employed its action expertise to create a game which could be described as Monster Hunter meets Oblivion? But then we're not in the business of making games. Capcom is, and that's exactly what it's done. Say hello to Dragon's Dogma.

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Monster hunting.

Fantasy action title from Capcom next year.