The makers of Resident Evil and Devil May Cry are now working on an open-world game with sorcerers and dragons.
Capcom has at least one new IP on the schedule for 2012. The publisher has officially unveiled Dragon’s Dogma, an ambitious new game from the team responsible for Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry 4. Dragon’s Dogma will be the first game in a new Capcom franchise, and will begin with a quest to track down and slay a mysterious fire-breathing dragon.
Getting into the details, Dragon’s Dogma is a “highly stylized action combat” game in which players do battle with a variety of colorful monsters, although the new title is far more open-ended than Capcom’s previous forays into the genre. The medieval setting seems to borrow more from Demon’s Souls than Devil May Cry, and the studio will be using the MT Framework engine to create a “vast, richly detailed world, ripe for exploration” with “hundreds of fully voiced NPCs.”
The gameplay, meanwhile, also has a few RPG influences. Players will enter battle alongside a party of three adventurers and will have to develop those characters in order to make the team more effective during combat. For instance, a new gameplay trailer shows how both fire and might will be needed to bring down a multi-headed hydra, although it’s not yet clear how duties will be divided amongst the characters.
With that in mind, I must admit that I’m a little skeptical about Dragon’s Dogma. Capcom is promising a game with “accessible depth” – combat will reportedly take everything from the weight of your weapon to the length of your legs into account – but the publisher also says that the complexity will not interrupt the flow of action, and I’m not quite sure how that’s going to work in practice. I’m certainly willing to be impressed, but I’m going to reserve judgment until we know a little more about the title.
The first trailers and screenshots are below. We get glimpses of a party that seems to include a mage, a warrior, and a rogue, and the footage definitely qualifies as epic.
Dragon’s Dogma will be available for the PS3 and the Xbox 360 in early 2012. That’s still a ways away, so I’m sure we’ll here more in the weeks and months to come.
