Today’s Dragon’s Dogma  developer blog is brought to us by Makoto Tanaka, game designer and all-around friendly man. Enjoy, and don’t forget to give your thoughts in the comments!

In Dragon’s Dogma, you will play in a world made up of people living their own lives and experiencing their own culture, with animals so close you can touch. That is where our conversation started. When talking amongst the RnD staff on this title, we didn’t want to simply create a world with realistic images, but we wanted to have things that occurred in the real world also occur here, to make it feel real.  

Imagine for a moment that you have been thrown into the plains of Africa. There are various animals living there and beasts going in for the kill. Just then, a large creature–an elephant, perhaps–walks by. By swapping that out with something “fantasy”, you end up with something truly compelling! A goblin hiding amongst the shrubs or a cyclops walking across the field.

We tried to create an adventurous world where you wouldn’t know what to expect, with a bit of fantasy. It was from that that we wound up with the pure concept of this world–something that a child may well have dreamed up.

In order for us to bring the player deeper into the game, we had to come back around and think about what is considered “normal”.  

– What happens when you are drenched in water? What happens when you touch fire? 

– What happens to the mentality of the adventurer when it becomes dark at night?

– What kind of things can you do when you fight against a giant beast with wings, like a Griffin?

There was a lot of discussion regarding what we perceive to be the norm in our world and what could realistically happen in a fantasy world. And working from that, we were then able to use that world as the setting for a Capcom-like game and action. The final product is an open-world action game– Dragon’s Dogma.

By “action,” we do not simply mean it in the sense of an “action game,” but also in the sense that you are  touching and interacting with the world.

So when you interact with things, people, and creatures in the game, they all react. You can also get caught up fighting big creatures as well. We are looking to bring an unprecedented level of high quality action and interactivity to an open world game.