Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a technically advanced title that is often quite stunning, packing some of the best lighting I’ve seen this generation – while the gameplay mechanics have attracted multiple plaudits. However, on the flipside, there’s no doubt that it’s also saddled with performance issues and configuration problems, producing an occasionally unsatisfactory experience on both PC and console platforms. Thankfully, developer Capcom has been quick to deploy the game’s first patch on consoles, which promises fixes for the game’s variable frame-rate and always-on motion blur, alongside a toggle to disable its ray tracing effects entirely. Has the game been comprehensively improved? Or is this just one small step towards the more polished, performant game we would have liked to have seen at launch?
There are a surprising amount of changes in the first Dragon’s Dogma 2 patch and one of the principle ways in which Capcom attempts to improve performance is to include the toggle to enable or disable ray traced global illumination – standard fare for other RE titles, but hard-set to the ‘on’ position when the game launched, with no RT support at all on Xbox Series S. Disable RT on Series X or PS5 though, and we get a markedly different lighting presentation.
To be fair, some shots look similar enough, but most of the time, the RTGI nicely fills in shade and adds bounce lighting that ends up being crucial to the way the image comes together, presenting a markedly more natural look whether indoors or outdoors, with much improved light occlusion. The new non-RT visual option gets screen-space ambient occlusion and some form of global illumination, it seems, but it’s a far cry from how the game presents with ray tracing. Toggle RT on and off, and it’s remarkable to see the limits of the more traditional SSAO laid bare.
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