Dragon's Dogma 2 is being review bombed on Steam over microtransactions, but the situation has been blown out of proportion

Dragon's Dogma 2 has just been released and, er, people are certainly talking about it, though a lot of that chatter isn’t positive. You see, reviews for the version of the game on Steam are already mostly negative, citing performance issues and a huge day one DLC lineup that’s rubbed people the wrong way.

Now, largely thanks to the whole 30 fps on consoles discourse and debate about whether slaughtering a bunch of innocent NPCs would be a good way to try and improve your fps numbers on PC (they were joking, put the sword down), we already knew the game was taxing on hardware. But, now the DLC’s entered the fray too, and, er, there’s lots of it.

Let’s kick off with a picture of how negative the reception to the game over on Steam has been so far. As of writing, the game has just jumped back up to a ‘mixed’ overall verdict, with only 40% of the 6,300-ish reviews it’s racked up so far being positive. As alluded to earlier, the majority of the reasons cited for giving a big thumbs down are related to performance, microtransactions, or both.

So, what’s the issue with the latter? Well, there are 21 bits of DLC on offer for the game right now, and it’s a list that might look pretty familiar to anyone who’s played one of Capcom’s games recently. The vast majority of what’s on offer are extra in-game items, ranging from rift crystals, to wakestones, portcrystals, and camping sets.

As has sadly come to be the norm with this kind of thing, a big reason for the sheer volume of microtransactions on offer is that there are several different kinds and strengths of pack you can buy in terms of those stones and crystals. Now, here’s the thing, if you’re planning on playing the game and aren’t bothered about making it easier or more convenient for yourself, you can probably ignore the vast majority of this stuff.

You should end up with a decent amount of these items just filtering into your inventory naturally as you play and find things, with most of them being available pretty early on. We've even put together this guide offering a lot more info on how to grab each of them. That said, it seems like there’s a bit more of a debate to be had with regards to things like the portcrystals and the fact you can buy a consumable “Art of Metamorphosis” book that allows you to change your character’s appearance.

Since the game seriously limits the amount of fast travelling you can do as a design choice and also doesn’t let you rejig your Arisen’s mug whenever, some players are arguing that including microtransactions based around these things is a bit like Capcom selling features back to you. That said, as alluded to, you can still also obtain both items just by playing.

Oh, and there’s also one microtransaction that gives you a single-use key that you can use to escape from jail - Capcom might need to use one of these to get out of public opinion jail right now.