Dragon's Dogma 2 has finally got its long-awaited performance patch, and players are over the moon about how the game runs.
Dragon's Dogma 2 is a great game, one of the best open-world games in my eyes, and was my game of the year back in 2024. Despite that, it garnered a lot of criticism over many of its aspects, namely some of the punishing mechanics and friction it imposed on the player with the limited fast travel and Dragonsplague – a disease that could wipe out an entire village of NPCs, locking you out of quests in the process. I loved a lot of its esoteric features (Dragonsplague is so cool) but one thing we could all agree on was the performance was not it. As the RE Engine's first open-world game, the engine struggled to keep up, which we later saw with Monster Hunter Wilds' woes.
However, with the announcement of Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen, Capcom decided it was going to tackle the game's biggest issues. This began with an update earlier this summer which added unlimited fast travel and some quality of life adjustments, and another update launching today which added new save slots, adjustments to Dragonsplague, and crucially, performance improvements.
With the release of the update today, fans flooded the Dragon's Dogma subreddit to talk about the improvements, with performance being a big talking point. One user says, "The performance boost is insane," with another noting, "I went from 30 ON LOW to 60 on high, Capcom im sorry I doubted you."
And, as another post points out, this update actually lowered the system requirements on the game's Steam page, too.
Of course, Capcom needed to improve the performance either way, but I think the Nintendo Switch 2 is partly to thank too. Given the developers would need to get it running on the handheld, it likely played a big role in this update, too.
