Dragon’s Dogma 2 players plan “NPC killing sprees” for more FPS 

Capcom’s anticipated high-fantasy RPG Dragon’s Dogma 2 launches on March 22, and everything we’ve found out so far about its gameplay has only served to heighten enthusiasm for the release. However, it seems the game currently suffers from frame rate-related performance issues, and while the developers are in the midst of trying to fix things, players are also coming up with possible solutions, and they don’t seem to mind getting NPC blood on their hands for some “extra FPS.” 

While Dragon’s Dogma 2’s release is being preceded by rave reviews and GOTY predictions from all sides, early impressions unfortunately also mention issues in frame rate consistency when running the game on PC. According to a report by IGN, Capcom is aware of the problem, and the developers are already working on future performance improvements (albeit no specific time frame for said fixes has been given). 

As for the cause of the problem, Capcom’s representative suggests that the problem may lie in how demanding concentrations of NPCs are for CPU: “In Dragon’s Dogma 2, a large amount of CPU usage is allocated to each character and dynamically calculates the impact of their physical presence in various environments. In certain situations where numerous characters appear simultaneously, the CPU usage can be very high and may affect the frame rate. We are aware that in such situations, settings that reduce GPU load may currently have a limited effect; however, we are looking into ways to improve performance in the future.” (via IGN) 

With official confirmation that NPCs are the problem, players have jokingly come up with a way to “optimize” Dragon’s Dogma 2 for the time being – killing off inessential NPCs.  

This approach might break the hearts of Dragon’s Dogma 2’s developers though, as one of their goals in designing the game was to make the player feel responsibility towards “death” and the lives of NPCs. This is why they made it so that NPCs no longer respawn infinitely – in the sequel, you will have a limited number of days to resurrect a deceased NPC using Wakestones, after which they will be gone forever. Commenting this decision in a past interview with us, the title’s producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi said, “When there is death, we take it seriously, and it affects how we act. In a world without death, I think people would be irresponsible and apathetic to their own actions.” 

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is scheduled to release on March 22 for the PC (Steam), PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.