Dragon's Dogma 2 players have quietly devised a way to warn others of the dreaded Dragonsplague - but it might not be enough

Dragon's Dogma 2 Dragonsplague pawn with red eyes in cutscene
(Image credit: Capcom)

Dragon's Dogma 2 players continue to live in fear of Dragonsplague, but it seems they're starting to devise ways to warn others about the spread of the infection.

There are a handful of in-game warning signs for the Dragon's Dogma 2 Dragonsplague, but if you fail to take heed of them, an affected pawn might just go off and murder an entire village while you're napping. Since the principal way of getting rid of a plagued pawn is to shuffle it back to its original player in the rift, some Good Samaritans want to try and make the warning signs more obvious.

Since the game's launch, a number of players have suggested sending infected pawns back to their original masters with a gift of rotten food or wilted flowers to indicate their sickened status, as Eurogamer notes. There are threads on Steam and all over Reddit that seem to have independently come up with the same idea: that giving a rotten item as a gift is a great way to communicate that there's a plague problem.

There are two issues with this idea. The first is that, obviously, the player who gets your gift of rotten food might just think you're being a jerk. The second, more pressing problem is that there's no indication that this'll actually work. We don't know for certain that the servers actually track which pawns have Dragonsplague, so a pawn that's plagued in your game might not actually return to its creator with the disease. In fact, some anecdotal testing from players suggests that's the case, but it's far from definitive.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is a game filled with bizarre mysteries and unexplained mechanics, and it's little surprise that the Dragonsplague remains one such conundrum even now after players have largely stopped freaking out about it. Just know that the next time you get a pawn back with some rotten food in tow, some kind player out there was trying to give you a vital warning. Or, you know, they were just using you as a trash can.

Game devs praise Dragon's Dogma 2's insta-kill arrow, which saves the game when you use it: "Might be the funniest game design candy I've seen in a AAA video game in a long time."

Dustin Bailey
Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.