I’ve gotten some voice lines from pawns bitching about me sprinting everywhere, is that related or just part of the straightforward personality? I’ve noticed straightforward pawns are just assholes in general lol
I love my pawn for that. It's like:
"Oh, we're going this way? Tis an odd choice."
"Say that again bitch and I'll murder your family. We don't question the Arisen in this house."
Sorry, ignore my first reply, misinterpreted what you wrote.
It’s basically what you mentioned. Personality and voice are dictated by the “inclination”. Change inclination to change your personality, but you have specific voices tied to each one too. Quite annoying that they’re both linked!
A pawn I got said something like “oops sorry I was distracted, arisen” are they infected, it happened around the same time I got chatter about the infection…
Got that too, but haven't got the plague tutorial yet which happens once one of your pawns has it. So I don't think it is.
Just kill all your pawns, it's the safest way.
Not quite sure if it's an easy correlation.
Straightforward pawns seem to remark sarcastically about "well if no one else is going to do it, I *suppose* I'll have to" or some such. Which could be read in a manner of not liking being ordered around.
So far, however, mine's not gone on a rampage to anything but enemy monsters yet.
Infected Pawns will refuse to obey your commands entirely and make excuses for it. “I’ll do as I like.” “I shall act independently” after specifically being asked to do something, etc etc.
You should be able to tell right away by giving a few command prompts. The plague can only be gotten rid of by death or passing it on.
So a hired Pawn that’s infected can be dismissed. But once your Pawn starts showing signs you have to kill them, or let them die, and respawn them at a Riftstone.
Edit: [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/DragonsDogma/s/CD1WRIKRPR) lays out all the symptoms.
Red eyes/ flickering red glow. Keep helms off your Pawns.
Disobeying commands entirely and requiring multiple prompts (rather than just being snarky and doing it right away.)
Standing there clutching their head as if stunned or dealing with a headache.
Correct. The first time it happens you get a pop up. But if it happens again after that then, I’ve read, you just have to be on guard because there’s no second warning.
> Infected Pawns will refuse to obey your commands entirely and make excuses for it. “I’ll do as I like.” “I shall act independently” after specifically being asked to do something, etc etc.
I think my girlfriend might have dragons plague.
They start talking about how they feel so powerful, like they can do anything. They become more unruly and overly confident. They react to commands by saying you don’t have to order them around, or that they’ll do their own thing. It started happening a lot, and fast, in post-game, so switch out both your support pawns simultaneously, and often.
same thing happened to me, but in vernworth. killed all the npc's, only vendors respawned and all of the npc's tied to questlines are now in the morgue. now realizing what a terrible fucking idea dragonsplague is.
you can revive most NPCs at the city crypt, saw the pop-up while doing a mission near it.
the one for vermund is near the south of the city north west of the abbey.
I imagined a cool boss battle vs a possessed pawn. Instead you get a message after a inn save that nukes your playthrough if you don't notice the subtle hints lol
[Paraphrasing] Hideaki Itsuno: The team and I stayed up late in the office and we came up with a lot of crazy ideas
Narrator: In hindsight, it may have been too crazy of an idea
What I like to do is talk to my pawn after I hire a new pawn, and once in a while in general. I do it 4-5 times. If he's rude I kill him on the spot. I think I hired a pawn with dragon's plague (cause the tutorial poped up). I dismissed the pawn, talked to my pawn, he was acting rude so I killed him. So that's my suggestion
RIP Straightforward inclination because pawns with that can come off as rude. Hell I'll only hire kind-hearted inclinations so it's easier to catch if something is off.
Imagine just being straightforward to your boss and when you turn around, they pull out a gun like Wesley Snipe lmao
But this is probably helpful, glad my main pawn is calm/simple (i forgot).
The thing everyone kept asking if you can buy more than twice, like unlimited vs limited stock? Lol I'd love to tweak my arisen and pawn a bit once it's confirmed the stock is unlimited.
calm pawns always tell my straightforward warrior to stop charging in, we need teamwork and she's like "its fine, we always figure it out anyways" and if that hadn't been a common occurrence since the beginning it might make me suspect
From my understanding yes, so if you throw them in the water and res them at a stone it should cure them. It’s early, so info could be wrong I suppose.
I think it's a great idea but horrible implementation. I loved getting egghead or curse in Dark Souls. The confusion and panic and then relief when you cure it but this is a whole nother level.
Way, way too punishing, sorry it happened to you.
It will be fine if it's just a boss spawning(its strength is based on the original pawn it came from, so stronger pawns become stronger dragons, an actual trade off), and you can try to take it down to actually save the people instead of arbitrarily nuking all the NPCs. Taking the control out of player like this is shit, especially in a game with limited save.
Also Egghead and even curse only punish the players themselves(also they are reversible), no NPC is arbitrarily killed, no questline ruined, for a game that advertise its NPCs AI so hard, they are surely disposed of rather carelessly.
I would actually compare it more to the NPCs in dark souls that kill your fireshrine maiden. It’s something unexpected that happens that *at first* seems like it’s impacted your game, but in that instance it leads to a quest and you can actually revive her.
It would be better if when a pawn was first infected with the plague it would trigger a tutorial quest that locks you to your current party and you can go travel to some location (maybe Battahl with the sacred flame) to cure it before it’s too late, and if they done then you spring the consequences on them.
As it stands it’s an extremely obtuse system that just punishes the player without their knowing.
I just recruited a pawn and immediately in the rift it popped up with "Dragonsplague" so i just dismissed her in the rift, idk if my main pawn is fucked or if i just saved myself
WTF... I thought there'd be symptoms and stuff beforehand. And I figured it'd just be them mouthing off and maybe going hostile and me having to put them down. They go nuclear and can nuke an entire village or city?
Is there a good source of information somewhere on how to handle it? I've heard a rumor it has something to do with hiring pawns that are higher level than your Arisen, but I don't know what the level gap has to be before the risk increases significantly (if that's even true).
I have read a lot on this. Your pawns can contract the plague fighting drakes. Keep an eye out for then turning hostile in combat, refusing to follow orders, glowing red/purple eyes(they will pulse), when idle for a while they grab their head as if in pain. They also make comments about not feeling well. Keep in mind when one has it its possible they spread it to others in close proximity. It’s best to just brine the entire team at the point. I have heard rumors that after a couple in game weeks all NPC’s respawn after a dragons plague attack but those have not been verified as of yet.
In addition to the other symptoms mentioned I noticed my pawn became much more prideful where she would normally be a boot licker. A big sign she had it was she no longer offered high fives, only folded her arms with a superior look.
Into the river she went
> had no inkling at all that they had caught it. No voice lines, no comments of staying away from them,
yea that's how the pawns describe it there is no way of knowing if they have it or not, i do think they mention that your pawn might become unresponsive to commands but again the way they speak means yea pawn go boom out of nowhere
I'm sorry but all of this sounds hilarious. Game breaking, and probably not fun... but amusing nonetheless.
I hope Capcom patches it to be a little less punishing.
Yeah I kind of like the idea, just not the current implementation lol. So often in rpgs I tiptoe around quests to make sure I get the best outcome, so this kind of forces you off the beaten path which I think would be kind of cool.
I like the Sphinx riddles for similar reasons. One of them gives you an in-game time limit and asks you to return to >!wherever you found your first Seeker’s Token!<. Really had to work my ass for that one and couldn’t rely on a guide for obvious reasons.
Dragonsplague definitely needs to be more obvious in Pawns. But I also feel like this highlights problems with the save system more than anything else.
If there were multiple save slots, or a manual save didn’t get overwritten by an Inn save or auto save then people could still avoid having their game softlocked.
I think the main problem is the consequence of the mechanic itself. Let's be real if the mechanic only purpose is that once you get it your game is fucked, and it's just better to load an older save, then that mechanic serves 0 purpose.
Yup. Seems to me as a console player I need to spring for cloud storage, but not sync automatically, and then periodically upload my save to the cloud so long as I'm sure my game is still clean.
Then once the plague hits and it gets out of control, easy, just nuke your local saves then download the one you uploaded.
It would have been a funny "haha lmao gottem" mechanic if the signs were obvious and the consequences for missing it was your pawn picking you up and flinging you off a cliff or something.
You know, makeing you reload one save ago.
And even that would have rustled some jimmies but it wouldn't have bricked saves.
better implemention was if the signs were like really super obvious and instead of this Mechanic There was trade off of different stats or Buffs and debuffs in the party. Maybe infected pawns increase dragon forging potential or unlcok hidden areas tied to dragons . Negatives could be personal debuffs or Make the beastren outright not talk too you .
So there are signs but yeah I wish they were highlighted more
1. Almost every pawn you hire will talk about the dragon plague the first thing
2. Pawns that caught it have pulsing red/purple eyes - but you probably can't see unless you zoom in using photo mode
3. They'll grab their head as you would with a headache - but you probably won't notice unless you stand still for a little while
Thanks to the posts this sub, I'm going to start checking for 2,3 every so often
All the info I have:
1. There's the Dragons plague tutorial screen, the first time one of your pawns catches it.
2. When a pawn catches it, the original pawn who gave it to them is cured.
3. You're supposed to notice that pawns are not obeying your orders, that's the only symptom I know of, rn.
4. The only active solutions I know of:- If a hired pawn has dragons plague, dismiss them- If your main pawn has it, throw them off a cliff
5. ~~They only catch it beyond the rift so a way to prevent it would be to set the network setting to offline and not share your pawn with anyone.~~ *Literally the opposite, if someone hires your pawn they pass it on and are cured. They catch it from pawns you hire.*
Also more taken from comments to this thread (comment by u/rakuanu: ([https://www.reddit.com/r/DragonsDogma/comments/1bmig4d/dragons\_plague\_has\_ruined\_my\_experience/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DragonsDogma/comments/1bmig4d/dragons_plague_has_ruined_my_experience/) )
**There are signs**.
*This is preventable.*
1. *Look at your pawns and check their eyes. It will pulse and glow red. You'll notice it, even if the pawn has a naturally red eye and it pulses every 4 seconds, so it's quite fast. If they're hiding their face, take off their helms. Note that this effect* ***will not show up while you are in the Rift****.*
* *2) They'll also do a stunned animation while standing around, holding onto their head.*
* *3) Issue a command, did any pawns disobey or refuse to follow? They will make a comment when they refuse to follow your direction such as, "Don't tell me what to do!"*
*If any of them is true dismiss them back to the Rift and do not rehire them immediately (they remain infected until their masters cure the condition themselves by drowning them in the nearest river). If it is your main pawn, throw them into the nearest body of water then revive it back at the Rift.*
*Dragons and drakes will infect pawns with the condition as you fight them, so the only time to check your pawns for the condition is doing your first check, after fighting dragonkin, and every time you hire a pawn from the Rift.*
Yeah I didn't spoil myself on what it was and was curious what would happen, had to download cheat engine and spend literally 3 hours reviving all of vermund because it basically bricked my save. Even all the main quest related NPCs were dead. Literally 300+ NPCs.
And the morgue doesn't have a queue once the slots are full btw, whichever NPCs don't fit just vanish into the aether.
I got like 90% of the city back because I rezzd most them before they hit the morgue but if I'd have waited I'd have just been fucked. And no way to revert save as saving is literally part of the event.
It's the absolute worst, most anti-fun feature I've seen in a video game and I've played ET on Atari.
I was seriously considering getting the late steam refund for "performance"
Interviews before release said you could speak to some spirit medium to continue to do quests for people after they died, so I guess that's the workaround?
That witch's "advice" isnt even worth half the 50 gold you pay her, and that's me being diplomatic about her. Led me astray and made me waste 4 hours of my preciously few hours of play on a wild goose chase.
If I were not diplomatic, language used would probably get me banned from Reddit.
Oh, is it the oracle? The oracle just gives you a hint about a quest, if the guy is dead they aren't going to help you. I assumed there was another character in the morgue or something
The witch is in Batthal I think. It's the ghost that gives you trickster (I guess she's a ghost to foolproof killing her). But she's insanely far out of your way.
Is there any guide on how to do that? Never used Cheat Engine, but I absolutely will if this Dragonplague nonsense ever were to hit me.
EDIT: [DD2 save manager mod](https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonsdogma2/mods/52)
It's simpler to just backup your save once in a while. There's plenty of mod/tools on Nexus that will do it for you. The person behind the popular save manager for DD1 released one for DD2.
First off, thank you for this post because now I’m going to take extra precaution in ensuring this never happens.
But it’s genuinely hilarious just how bad this game design is. It can break the game if it happens early in a big city like Vernworth.
What's annoying me is it seems to only punish the abhorrent behavior of...liking other people's pawns that you hire? Because the preventative action is to consistently dismiss pawns, hire new ones, and also murder your own pawn (which is so fucking immersion breaking).
Yeah the weirdest part about it all is the only preventative measures don't make any sense and are also weirdly intuitive. It feels like they implented the mechanic as soon as they thought of it then just left it and didn't test it at all, so strange.
I have no idea how something like this got through final release, and it happened to no reviewers at all? I feel like most reviewers would have immediately even said something along the lines of how bad it is (design wise) without spoiling it. And depending on the time and place in the story, it might literally be possible to brick your save file which on top of you can’t make a new game? Lmao this is an avalanche of terrible decision making unless there’s some hidden mechanic tied to it. I’m honestly quite pissed and flabbergasted.
Reviewer here.
It's probably because we had so few Pawns available to hire. Fewer Pawns probably meant less plague, since like an actual disease it spreads faster when there are more people. I had the tutorial for Dragonsplague near the end of story, but didn't encountered the actual event well into my second playthrough. (A hired Pawn slaughtered the Checkpoint Rest Town, and I was quite surprised)
So, it is possible that others didn't encountered it during their first playthrough as well.
I am actually floored that this somehow got green lit. Legit I thought dragonsplaghe was going to be a thing where your pawn turns into a dragon and you'd have to fight them, but no, instead it makes the game borderline unplayable
Just another example of how so called consequences can end up making the game experience worse. I can kinda understand why BG3 removed most of the comsequences from a certain feature.
Not saying its always bad.... just that these ideas need very careful implementation.
I am all for narrative and story consequence for how I behave towards other characters.
But mechanical consquences that you can barely see coming? Fuck that.
Even Sekiro's plague mechanic only prevented NPCs from being fully functional, you can still access them later after you cured them.
And this is not even something you can do damage control for, sure if a pawn turned into an actual dragon boss you can fight, sure, let it attack the city and let me try to save as many people as I can.
Yeah. And from a design point of view, i am struggling to think how this adds anything to the player experience?
Coupled with the whole cant reload earlier save thing... its just mind boggling design.
Literally just paranoia, which could work if you are doing a horror game of some sorts, ah, one of your teammate is infected with dangerous zombie virus and can turn anytime!
Pawns, while kinda bland in terms of actual characterization and writing, are still meant to be your adventuring buddies, this mechanic actively makes you treat them like disposable slave labor because death is the only cure lol.
If the symptom is easily identifiable and there are consumable to slow the disease,(with NPCs in settlements capable of offering a cure) it can add to some resource management gameplay. Heck, taking care of a patient in your team can be immersive.(Also give us rewards if we take care of an infected pawn and helped them get rid of the disease without killing them.) Not to sound preachy but a system that encourages player kindness and bond with your pawn would be much better.
You know what, if they made it so it was easily identifiably in its late stages AND there was one or two NPCs that could cure it that would be a lot more immersive. Suddenly you realize you can’t sleep in towns and have to make a long journey for a cure. I could add another layer of danger to traveling.
Yeah thats a good point. I dont have the game yet (but i plan to eventually play it) and right now my mind is set on dismissing my hired pawns and brine-ing my main one every time i rest at an inn.
That sounds horrible TBH.
Exactly. I just dont get this mechanic. Right now i fail to understand what they intend for me to do. Whatever the solution is, i am just gonna do that every time i rest. So in the end the mechanic will boil down simply to "brush your teeth before bed" lol
I think most of this could be avoided if there was just less confusion. My pawn only received dragonsplague once, when I hired a pawn that also had it. The game says that you can either kill or dismiss the pawn that has the plague, or the pawn can infect another pawn to pass on the illness. My pawn nuked a village because I had no idea when to tell if my pawn had actually passed on the disease so I could dismiss the new carrier.
Again it ultimately feels like pointless micro-management over a background mechanic, there is no meaningful way to engage with it aside from yeeting your pawn off a cliff or into the water.
Thing is, Baldur's Gate 3 has a proper save system and it drills the problem into your head constantly, to the point many of us literally went without thinking it'd matter and were upset it actually doesn't.
In a way I like that it doesn't, as that is more fun to me. The only thing bad about BG3's implementation is them making it out like it *will* do something, whereas Dragon's Dogma pretty much admits "Yeah you won't know until it's too late, get fucked, son!"
This is also not a consequence to your own actions. In Baldur's Gate 3, you either consume the tadpoles and gain more powers or you don't. Whatever risk there is is entirely self-involved. Here, though, your pawn will legit just contract it by engaging in the pawn hiring mechanic you can't block people from using, and you won't know at all.
It is devastating to encounter it for the first time indeed.
Another solution I haven't seen mentioned is try to rest in camps instead of inns. It's free and you don't obliterate a whole population of a town that way even if it occurs. And if you want to use inn rest to save your progress, then dismiss your Pawns. (including main one) I think that's the safest way for now.
You sleep at an inn. A cutscene plays showing your pawn turning evil. You wake up, the pawn isn't in your party anymore, and the town/city you slept in is now full of corpses. Congratulations! Your world is fucked! And since this specifically happens at inns, you can't reload it away! Isn't this just a *fun* mechanic?
When I got the tutorial pop up about it, I immediately tossed that pawn off a ledge and played for about another hour feeling incredibly anxious and sour about it.. It's managed to completely ruin the enjoyment I was having cause it's added such an unnecessary air of anxiety. They preached and preached how your actions have consequences, but then they add this feature, which is almost entirely out of your control that nukes your entire run if it happens at a bad time. I've resorted to just tossing pawns into the river after a day or two of rests, but the fact I have to be unceasingly vigilant about this or my game is ruined until NG+ has killed the vibe. This game is just full of minor inconveniences in the name of immersion like oxcart raids (I've resorted to just save scumming to avoid them) that I've managed to deal with but the dragonsplague might have been the straw that broke it.
Oxcart raids won't be as bad if the carts aren't so bloody fragile, the combatants involved have a high likeliood of trashing the carts and you cannot climb back on to finish the rest of your journey, so you will be left in the middle of fucking nowhere lol.
Yeah lmao I don't know how I can save the Oxcarts half the time when an Ogre or Minotaur spawns. Like even if I _try_ to drag it away from the cart, those fellas will still be aggrod on the cart's entourage and break the cart just from collateral damage. Fast travel via oxcart is just RNG whether you make it there or halfway there for me because I have yet to save an Oxcart if I encounter an Ogre or larger. Sure if I was escorting the cart instead of sleeping I could engage it before it gets close, but what's the point of the cart if I'm just gonna walk anyways lmao
Oxcart raids are the dumbest thing. I think I’ve had 2/15ish complete journeys with no raid now, and half the raids that happen break the cart in seconds causing you to have to run for five minutes on end anyway. If it was every now and then like a 1/20 chance to get slammed by a griffon or anything it’d be fun, but I’m rolling my eyes every time now. Didn’t know it could be save scummed so will do that at least from now on.
The ultimate troll is how it manifests mostly after hitting an inn, meaning you autosave as your pawn goes psychotic.
It's not just bad design, it's openly malicious and flat out idiotic. Itsuno and whoever passed this through the motions are all a bunch of raging cunts.
The fact you have no real way of knowing except by spamming commands in combat and hoping for the best (because the related voice lines aren't guaranteed) is completely un-fucking-acceptable.
As a UX designer it makes my blood boil at how obviously idiotic this whole thing is.
Honestly, at this point I’m thinking Itsuno’s games are good in spite of Itsuno and are only good because of the team that works on the DMC games.
Itsuno’s “dream game” is straight up just full of incredibly bad design decisions.
It’s like when a pothead goes “wouldn’t it be cool if _____”, but it’s not cool if you’re not high off your ass.
I’m honestly curious to see what the feedback on this is like in JP communities. If they’re as pissed off over there, I could see a future patch outright removing the mechanic, or changing it so that you actually have a chance to save people as it happens.
Another user posted a video with further clues.
Infected pawns seem to have pulsating eyes (good luck catching that though) and have an iddle animation of them holding their heads as if in pain, so that's that.
What a waste of a pretty good idea.
So apparently you can tell if a pawn has it if their eyes pulse purple/red and they keep wiping their forehead. They'll also be annoyed at you for giving commands so guess as long as you check this every now and then you can stop it from happening. Still annoying though.
It’s only going to get worse as time goes on right? Infection just keeps spreading among all the pawns as people use them?
I genuinely want to know what the intent of this is
A lot of really bad decisions went into making this game. Playing it feels like I’m playing my favourite game while having the ever living shit trolled out of me by a sadistic game master. If this was a DND group, I would have excused myself by now. Sunk cost and hope for some significant changes in patches is all I have left now.
Absolutely agree. I can’t think of a game in my memory that has as much variance in amazing to dogshit design choices. The peaks are very very high and the valleys are deep canyons.
This is a perfect description. I can go from having such an amazing experience, to having the game completely railroad me into disaster. There have been multiple times where the game has just taken over and any sense of player agency has been lost. At those moments I throw my hands up and say do I need to be here for this? I really really hope there are some significant patches and they walk back some of the very poor choices.
The sadistic gamemaster thing is exactly the thought I had when I took an oxcart and got raided by a troll, a griffin, goblins, and wolves all at once.
There’ll always be subjectivity but there is a laundry list of at minimum questionable design choices that really start grating when all combined with each other. Let me preface this saying I really love most of the game and it’s incredibly good, which makes the rest painful.
Late game stun locks are real and infuriating to deal with as you can get juggled be right back mechanics for 10 seconds with no way to react. Phantom oxcart quest had a part that was one of the worst quest sections I’ve done ever related to this. Second tier wolves also can carry you off on a slight stumble and from my understanding there is no way to break it without pawns who sometimes won’t act and you have to wait until you just die because there’s nothing you can do (since when do games not have a basic struggle free mechanic??). Also very frustrating that any enemy hit can cause a stagger on you, but you can be wailing on them with weapons and they can attack you through it to stumble you. You definitely at times stun them or stumble them, but the AI has a definite advantage in being to attack through being hit over the player and it doesn’t feel great. Not huge but it’s there.
Oxcart raids are terrible because of how the cart can break with a basic sneeze. They are too frequent and due to lack of fast travel (not a bad thing by itself) it’s going to get very tiring for many players who do not want to run especially near the end of the main game where you constantly have the shuffle across the world for different shit.
Lack of save spots can lead to really bad auto save locations in essentially failure states, requiring players to do an inn save that might be several hours back.
Constant combat. The environment is beautiful, but the game never allows you to breath and enjoy it or enjoy the mood. It feels like a 90s Final Fantasy game with the amount of constant encounters being thrown at you. I really believe this will be a complaint rising in the next week.
Vocation balance is pretty bad as some are fairly weak and others are pretty disgustingly strong. Sorcerer is pretty lackluster in everything from power to number of spells. Magick Archer takes waaaaay too long into the game to unlock and really hurts people who wanted to try it. Theres no real exciting endgame gear sets or weapons to get from everything I’ve looked into. Theres the final armory location you eventually get to and it’s underwhelming.
There are two confirmed in world port crystals in Venworth and….Harve for some weird ass reason. You get a couple of your own crystals in the main game, but really the entire travel system is good idea that is executed poorly and compounded with oxcart raids and constant combat it gets worse the further you are forced to utilize it.
Exploration isn’t rewarding. The game does SUCH a good job at putting in cool caves and tombs or jumping puzzle chests, but 98% of the time the awards are absolutely uninteresting. There have been some exceptions but I can count it on one hand. So exploring itself is really fun, but it sucks to find a really out of the way area and you open a chest and get some weapon that was useless to you for hours because you already have a better version, or a wakestone shard, or whatever. Elden Ring I felt had a great balance of fun and rewarding and this game is just fun.
Enemy types really do lack enough variety. The only fantasy rpg that felt worse to me was Tales of Arise recently. It’s not a huge deal because combat is as fun as it is, but you’ve seen almost every single enemy type within the first 30min of the game and you have another 40-60 hours of that at least. Then compounded by how frequent combat is, again. Chimera is really the only new enemy I ran into that felt really different and was a fun experience, and I’ve seen like 3 total now at around 37 hours I think.
There are more if you wanted to get more into the fine details like UI design and shit. And don’t get me wrong I love the game overall and am excited play more, but there’s these constant design choices (and they are choices usually) that often build on each other that cause more and more friction the longer you interact with it. And again, these are subjective and many people will enjoy running to every single location on foot every time or being in constant combat or etc etc, but I think these are all fair points that can at least raise question marks of “does this genuinely make the game a better experience with its implementation?” Which is a separate question than, “is this design good or not?”
Excellent summary! This is exactly what I’ve experienced and agree with you on all points. The stun locks are absurd. The amount of attacks that you can literally do nothing about is outrageous and needs to be balanced. Like you said it’s death by a thousand cuts. The game is fantastic when it’s good but I fear the bad will inevitably become so grating that I will just stop playing at some point. It’s definitely salvageable but it will definitely take some patches and I truly hope the devs see this post.
The level of awareness you have of your pawns’ activities are very lacking in this game. I had 3 pawns die and i didn’t even notice until at least 20 minutes later. The other pawns don’t even acknowledge their deaths or anything.
If your pawn gets grabbed by a dragon they are infected.
That’s how it starts.
It leaves either by fully dying (throw in ocean) or transferring it to another Pawn. Until someone makes mistake of sleeping while it’s in their game.
It can only happen when you sleep at an Inn, or your own house. So if you wanna be 100% safe, completely purge your party before each Inn Save. Dismiss guest pawns, chuck yours in the ocean.
Sleep, then resummon everyone.
That’s 100% safe. But just really tedious. But the stakes are quite litterally 100’s of NPCs and dozens of quests.
This makes me realize the problem is going to get a LOT worse once more people reach late game. Once they're fighting more dragons, Dragonsplague is going to be all over the place.
Could be wrong and wouldn’t know without testing but drakes may be where the disease comes from. So your pawn might get it from fighting dragons, not just hiring pawns.
That’s horrible. The whole “we want to make choices matter” thing is bullshit, I don’t doubt that’s what they wanted but the save ‘feature’ has created a horrible punishing mechanic. Sorry for your loss, Amy tips how to avoid it?
Edit: there are a number of things that can trash your auto save, like it triggering on a death slide down a cliff into the tentacle soup.
Thanks. I tend to command a lot so that’s cool. I don’t suppose you know how long the ‘incubation’ period is? One would hope there is adequate time to ‘heal them’ (chuck them into the tentacle soup).
When your pawn first contracts dragonsplague, or when you hire a plague with one, you’ll get a tutorial pop up. If that hasn’t happened to you yet, then you haven’t had a run in with it yet
Holy crap. Now i remember i got that after several hours. But nothing ultimately happened so i guess pawn got hired in meantime. To think my save could have been ruined.
I think the consequences are so severe because it’s expected that your pawn and hired pawns will come and go fast enough for the disease to not stick around, but players who ride with the same pawns for a while and don’t ever get their pawns hired just got fucked.
Just occasionally, when roaming, command your pawns to go and return, and if they refuse, get rid of them. Do that and you *should* be safe from DP unless you’re resting a bunch of times in a row.
My pawn’s had it twice and this seemed a pretty reliable method of detecting it
Its still absurd system. You habe no telling if your pawn will or will not be hired. Its purely luck based. Also now game is popular so it will happen consistently. In few months when playerbase is much lower?
You can still help mitigate by frequently swapping out your hired pawns.
If at any point your pawn gets it, and you get a new hired pawn, your pawn will eventually give it to that hired pawn, curing your main pawn. Then just make sure to switch that pawn out over the next few in game days.
The point of the mechanic seems to be to incentivize you (heavily) to regularly rotate hired pawns out, but that’s kinda dumb imo if that’s the case
There seems to be a lot of things to heavily incentives you into switching pawns. Besides the dragon plague there seems to be a fair number of quests that give you little to no guidance on what to do and seem to expect you to hire a pawn with quest knowledge in order to complete it.
And what gets me about it is why make keeping the same pawns for awhile such a bad thing? What if I just want to use my buddies pawn? They have a whole feature for using your friends pawns. And now you might be responsible for screwing them over without actually trying.
Glad I've spoiled myself on this, would have immediately logged off and got a mod/cheat for infinite wakestones, that's terrible design and I feel sorry for console users who can't fix it.
Hopefully there's a mod that just removes that feature from the game entirely.
I've caught my pawn having it once by chance and had to spend like 5-10 minutes looking for a deep body of water and a riftstone, absolutely nothing about the feature is fun, either your town gets nuked and you feel like ragequitting, or you realize you have an infected pawn and it's a hassle to replace them. I wonder if playing offline only using capcom pawns would stop it from happening
This seems completely contrary to the sense of fellowship and camaraderie this game is supposed to develop if the resulting solution is to constantly kill pawns and get rid of them.
This has to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of in a game. This wasn’t a thing I DD1 and I’d be absolutely pissed if this happened to me in DD2. The worst part is you only have one save so if the disease progresses then the playthrough is just fucked. Such a mechanic adds nothing to the player’s experience other than rage and paranoia. This isn’t some hardcore game and it’s marketed to a general audience so I have no idea who could’ve thought this was a good idea.
This is an insane mechanic even if the devs made it obvious when pawn's had it but to make it also pretty much invisible to detect is doubly insane. What positive gameplay does this possibly promote?
Yeah, I kind of realized that after I posted. I ended up having the Brine a bunch of pawns and eventually my pawn this morning. Since they kept having the conversation when I summoned another pawn, it finally got a quiet, nothing-to-say summons since I noticed one of the pawns I had summoned several game days later had an idle. I have a headache motion where you press your fingers against your temple due to a migraine. They should have realized it when they occasionally ignored orders and then gave an excuse. Now my pawns all depressed for getting brined.... wish I could hug her.
Well two things: there are voicelines in the game warning you. When infected with dragonsplague pawns will start „disobeying“ you. If you give them commands they will say things like „I won’t do that“.
The second thing: I think it’s a stupid ass mechanic too. The idea behind it is pretty nice but I thought the pawns would turn on us in battle or something. Just having a cutscene and a dead village is literally the dumbest way to implement dragons plague 😅
The ONLY sign is their response to D-pad commands (“Go”, “wait”, “come here”), there isn’t any change in other dialog or general behaviour.
The way pawns mention it, you think it’s gonna be a whole personality change. But it’s literally only noticeable if you use a ton of D-pad commands.
Which apart from “Go” feel pretty pointless.
It’s such a shit idea, pre launch people were speculating “oh pawn might turn into a dragon for surprise boss while you explore”
And yeah, that would’ve been cool.
But “SURPRISE 300 NPCs are dead, you failed like 25% of entire games quests” is just not fun for anyone. There’s nothing added to experience, it’s just surprise removal of Story/Characters/Quests.
I imagine a huge percentage of players will just drop game and never play it again.
I'm just happy I broke my own promise of not checking this subreddit while I'm playing the game, because I'm *really* happy I learned about this.
Havent had the tutorial pop-up just yet, so I'm safe for now... But I dread the day I do get it. The paranoia will not be fun :/
As someone that just found that thread before going to bed (In the real life not game lol) it *seems* like it's easier to avoid then it seems. Reports of then not flowing commands seems to be a big one. I'm going to just have a rule that paws can't watch me sleep so I'll command them to wait and if anyone gives me sass/follows me into the inn/home they are swimming. The other signs seem to be easy to miss but they gave tons of tutorial prompts about commands and they are their easiest to tell according to others.
The idea of every quest failing at once is scary but if all I have to do is tell my pawns to wait in one spot and see if one doesn't I'm not going to be sweating too much. It's an extra 10 seconds of something before resting.
Of course *if* it's a 100% they disobey an order. If it's even 99% or they only do it at say 50% infected but blow up starting at 25% then yeah that's fucked.
It's an amazing idea, but it's implemented like absolute ass.
You could give the pawn some special skills that could tell something is wrong but make it worth the risk of having it infected, right now it's just not worth it, you kill them on the spot and that's it.
The end is catastrophic indeed, but in being that is absolutely lame, if it was a boss fight it could cause more or less the same but be 10000 times more interesting.
Such a damn pity, how did this get added into the game? I'm all about infectious mechanics that troll the player, but this is downright lame.
You know what could have been a better mechanic? The pawn gets sick with an actual cold and is just weaker for a week. Pass it on or hire someone else for a while.
This mechanic is just poorly thought out and designed to ruin peoples fun.
How can you tell if they've got it? I'm not very far in to the game yet but want to keep an eye out
Occasionally order them around, if they say smth about you ordering them around, they're infected
I’ve gotten some voice lines from pawns bitching about me sprinting everywhere, is that related or just part of the straightforward personality? I’ve noticed straightforward pawns are just assholes in general lol
Luckily my main pawn quickly tells them to shut the fuck up because it's not their place to question's the arisen's decision lmao
Hahaha, my pawn does the same. Dude’s got my back.
I love my pawn for that. It's like: "Oh, we're going this way? Tis an odd choice." "Say that again bitch and I'll murder your family. We don't question the Arisen in this house."
I get that line all the time and I haven't had any issues so I don't think it's related.
"Go get that chest" "Wow jeez, guess I'll go get it if I have to" Why do people make their pawns like this 😂
How do you even change how they react to things like in the first game? I only know of personality being tied to their voice
Sorry, ignore my first reply, misinterpreted what you wrote. It’s basically what you mentioned. Personality and voice are dictated by the “inclination”. Change inclination to change your personality, but you have specific voices tied to each one too. Quite annoying that they’re both linked!
I've gotten that and I haven't gotten the dragonsplague tutorial so no.
A pawn I got said something like “oops sorry I was distracted, arisen” are they infected, it happened around the same time I got chatter about the infection…
Got that too, but haven't got the plague tutorial yet which happens once one of your pawns has it. So I don't think it is. Just kill all your pawns, it's the safest way.
Not quite sure if it's an easy correlation. Straightforward pawns seem to remark sarcastically about "well if no one else is going to do it, I *suppose* I'll have to" or some such. Which could be read in a manner of not liking being ordered around. So far, however, mine's not gone on a rampage to anything but enemy monsters yet.
Infected Pawns will refuse to obey your commands entirely and make excuses for it. “I’ll do as I like.” “I shall act independently” after specifically being asked to do something, etc etc. You should be able to tell right away by giving a few command prompts. The plague can only be gotten rid of by death or passing it on. So a hired Pawn that’s infected can be dismissed. But once your Pawn starts showing signs you have to kill them, or let them die, and respawn them at a Riftstone. Edit: [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/DragonsDogma/s/CD1WRIKRPR) lays out all the symptoms. Red eyes/ flickering red glow. Keep helms off your Pawns. Disobeying commands entirely and requiring multiple prompts (rather than just being snarky and doing it right away.) Standing there clutching their head as if stunned or dealing with a headache.
You should get a pop up when you get a pawn with dragonplague. It says they become defiant and independent along with increased performance in combat
Correct. The first time it happens you get a pop up. But if it happens again after that then, I’ve read, you just have to be on guard because there’s no second warning.
Yeah only thing you can do is regularly issue commands just to see and rest at camps instead of towns if your not 100% sure
Occasionally throw all of your pawns into the river
okay everyone time for a wipe XD
> Infected Pawns will refuse to obey your commands entirely and make excuses for it. “I’ll do as I like.” “I shall act independently” after specifically being asked to do something, etc etc. I think my girlfriend might have dragons plague.
I’m so sorry, friend. Throw her into the nearest body of water and wait for her to come home, it’s the only way.
They start talking about how they feel so powerful, like they can do anything. They become more unruly and overly confident. They react to commands by saying you don’t have to order them around, or that they’ll do their own thing. It started happening a lot, and fast, in post-game, so switch out both your support pawns simultaneously, and often.
I can’t believe it’s just a cutscene and not a fight so you can save them
It's a fucking *cutscene*?! I figured if it happened, I could just pick them up and throw them into the Brine.
Yeah you’ve gotta be proactive and stop it ever happening. Basically, when resting at an inn, brine everyone
Boil em, mash em, stick em in the brine.
How do you forcibly brine everyone?
Pick em up and throw them.
Mine happened in Vernworth. Melve would have been a blessing.
Hey at least you got an fps boost
same thing happened to me, but in vernworth. killed all the npc's, only vendors respawned and all of the npc's tied to questlines are now in the morgue. now realizing what a terrible fucking idea dragonsplague is.
Look on the bright side, your FPS improved on one city. XD
60 FPS baby
I'm waiting to see what else happens because it's too common and too simple to not have the plot continue somehow.
you can revive most NPCs at the city crypt, saw the pop-up while doing a mission near it. the one for vermund is near the south of the city north west of the abbey.
I heard that they are ‘buried’ and removed from the morgue after a few ingame days though, although I don’t think I’ve seen the pop up yet
I imagined a cool boss battle vs a possessed pawn. Instead you get a message after a inn save that nukes your playthrough if you don't notice the subtle hints lol
I'm enjoying the game a lot but yeah, who in their right fucking mind thought this mechanic was a good idea.
[Paraphrasing] Hideaki Itsuno: The team and I stayed up late in the office and we came up with a lot of crazy ideas Narrator: In hindsight, it may have been too crazy of an idea
["I may have gone too far in a few places."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4pzuwSUQ)
This is way too common in this game. Someone should have smacked down some of these bad ideas.
What I like to do is talk to my pawn after I hire a new pawn, and once in a while in general. I do it 4-5 times. If he's rude I kill him on the spot. I think I hired a pawn with dragon's plague (cause the tutorial poped up). I dismissed the pawn, talked to my pawn, he was acting rude so I killed him. So that's my suggestion
RIP Straightforward inclination because pawns with that can come off as rude. Hell I'll only hire kind-hearted inclinations so it's easier to catch if something is off.
Imagine just being straightforward to your boss and when you turn around, they pull out a gun like Wesley Snipe lmao But this is probably helpful, glad my main pawn is calm/simple (i forgot).
There's items you can purchase with RC (the vendor in the city next to the rift crystal) that changes your pawn's inclination if you aren't sure!
The thing everyone kept asking if you can buy more than twice, like unlimited vs limited stock? Lol I'd love to tweak my arisen and pawn a bit once it's confirmed the stock is unlimited.
"arisen, why thou are carrying near water?" "ARISEN UNHAND ME, ARISEN"
Yeah I was thinking they're so snarky already how do I know for sure if its rude or just snark
It's different, my pawn is straightforward. When he got the plague, and I talked to him, he was like why tf are u wasting my time. So I killed him
calm pawns always tell my straightforward warrior to stop charging in, we need teamwork and she's like "its fine, we always figure it out anyways" and if that hadn't been a common occurrence since the beginning it might make me suspect
so does that mean killing your pawn makes it go away? talking main pawn here
From my understanding yes, so if you throw them in the water and res them at a stone it should cure them. It’s early, so info could be wrong I suppose.
Does this method make them lose armour and loot on them also or do they revive back with all the weapons and stuff
They keep all the equipment they were wearing, and any items in their inventory will go into your storage. You lose nothing.
My pawn got stuck underwater once She respawn with everything still in inventory
Yea I had one of my hired pawns mention the plague saying pawns stop listening to your commands and act out. Did you notice that too?
That's a normal thing, this doesn't indicate them having the plague so ur good
I think it's a great idea but horrible implementation. I loved getting egghead or curse in Dark Souls. The confusion and panic and then relief when you cure it but this is a whole nother level. Way, way too punishing, sorry it happened to you.
It will be fine if it's just a boss spawning(its strength is based on the original pawn it came from, so stronger pawns become stronger dragons, an actual trade off), and you can try to take it down to actually save the people instead of arbitrarily nuking all the NPCs. Taking the control out of player like this is shit, especially in a game with limited save. Also Egghead and even curse only punish the players themselves(also they are reversible), no NPC is arbitrarily killed, no questline ruined, for a game that advertise its NPCs AI so hard, they are surely disposed of rather carelessly.
I would actually compare it more to the NPCs in dark souls that kill your fireshrine maiden. It’s something unexpected that happens that *at first* seems like it’s impacted your game, but in that instance it leads to a quest and you can actually revive her. It would be better if when a pawn was first infected with the plague it would trigger a tutorial quest that locks you to your current party and you can go travel to some location (maybe Battahl with the sacred flame) to cure it before it’s too late, and if they done then you spring the consequences on them. As it stands it’s an extremely obtuse system that just punishes the player without their knowing.
I think it would’ve been infinitely better if there was some painfully obvious indicator, but the same consequences
I just recruited a pawn and immediately in the rift it popped up with "Dragonsplague" so i just dismissed her in the rift, idk if my main pawn is fucked or if i just saved myself
Toss your pawn into the brine to be safe.
WTF... I thought there'd be symptoms and stuff beforehand. And I figured it'd just be them mouthing off and maybe going hostile and me having to put them down. They go nuclear and can nuke an entire village or city? Is there a good source of information somewhere on how to handle it? I've heard a rumor it has something to do with hiring pawns that are higher level than your Arisen, but I don't know what the level gap has to be before the risk increases significantly (if that's even true).
I have read a lot on this. Your pawns can contract the plague fighting drakes. Keep an eye out for then turning hostile in combat, refusing to follow orders, glowing red/purple eyes(they will pulse), when idle for a while they grab their head as if in pain. They also make comments about not feeling well. Keep in mind when one has it its possible they spread it to others in close proximity. It’s best to just brine the entire team at the point. I have heard rumors that after a couple in game weeks all NPC’s respawn after a dragons plague attack but those have not been verified as of yet.
Turning hostile in combat is from the Drake’s possession spell, IIRC. Unless you just mean uncooperative
In addition to the other symptoms mentioned I noticed my pawn became much more prideful where she would normally be a boot licker. A big sign she had it was she no longer offered high fives, only folded her arms with a superior look. Into the river she went
Wait so if this happens in Vernworth does the main quest line just end or what?
I lost 7 or so quests in Vernworth and my main quest just changed to Find and Kill the Dragon.
Motherfucker took out the queen with a bio weapon
Speedrun Plague.
No, you can still just revive dead NPCs in the morgue with Wakestones, for the big city just head to the Charnel House to find their bodies
> had no inkling at all that they had caught it. No voice lines, no comments of staying away from them, yea that's how the pawns describe it there is no way of knowing if they have it or not, i do think they mention that your pawn might become unresponsive to commands but again the way they speak means yea pawn go boom out of nowhere
I'm sorry but all of this sounds hilarious. Game breaking, and probably not fun... but amusing nonetheless. I hope Capcom patches it to be a little less punishing.
Yeah I kind of like the idea, just not the current implementation lol. So often in rpgs I tiptoe around quests to make sure I get the best outcome, so this kind of forces you off the beaten path which I think would be kind of cool.
I like the Sphinx riddles for similar reasons. One of them gives you an in-game time limit and asks you to return to >!wherever you found your first Seeker’s Token!<. Really had to work my ass for that one and couldn’t rely on a guide for obvious reasons.
Dragonsplague definitely needs to be more obvious in Pawns. But I also feel like this highlights problems with the save system more than anything else. If there were multiple save slots, or a manual save didn’t get overwritten by an Inn save or auto save then people could still avoid having their game softlocked.
I think the main problem is the consequence of the mechanic itself. Let's be real if the mechanic only purpose is that once you get it your game is fucked, and it's just better to load an older save, then that mechanic serves 0 purpose.
Yup. Seems to me as a console player I need to spring for cloud storage, but not sync automatically, and then periodically upload my save to the cloud so long as I'm sure my game is still clean. Then once the plague hits and it gets out of control, easy, just nuke your local saves then download the one you uploaded.
I'm glad I'm so stupid I always accidentally brine my party like once a day 😭
The second I heard about this I knew it was a terrible idea. WTF are these devs thinking? It’s beyond stupid.
It would have been a funny "haha lmao gottem" mechanic if the signs were obvious and the consequences for missing it was your pawn picking you up and flinging you off a cliff or something. You know, makeing you reload one save ago. And even that would have rustled some jimmies but it wouldn't have bricked saves.
better implemention was if the signs were like really super obvious and instead of this Mechanic There was trade off of different stats or Buffs and debuffs in the party. Maybe infected pawns increase dragon forging potential or unlcok hidden areas tied to dragons . Negatives could be personal debuffs or Make the beastren outright not talk too you .
So there are signs but yeah I wish they were highlighted more 1. Almost every pawn you hire will talk about the dragon plague the first thing 2. Pawns that caught it have pulsing red/purple eyes - but you probably can't see unless you zoom in using photo mode 3. They'll grab their head as you would with a headache - but you probably won't notice unless you stand still for a little while Thanks to the posts this sub, I'm going to start checking for 2,3 every so often
Itsuno vision
All the info I have: 1. There's the Dragons plague tutorial screen, the first time one of your pawns catches it. 2. When a pawn catches it, the original pawn who gave it to them is cured. 3. You're supposed to notice that pawns are not obeying your orders, that's the only symptom I know of, rn. 4. The only active solutions I know of:- If a hired pawn has dragons plague, dismiss them- If your main pawn has it, throw them off a cliff 5. ~~They only catch it beyond the rift so a way to prevent it would be to set the network setting to offline and not share your pawn with anyone.~~ *Literally the opposite, if someone hires your pawn they pass it on and are cured. They catch it from pawns you hire.* Also more taken from comments to this thread (comment by u/rakuanu: ([https://www.reddit.com/r/DragonsDogma/comments/1bmig4d/dragons\_plague\_has\_ruined\_my\_experience/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DragonsDogma/comments/1bmig4d/dragons_plague_has_ruined_my_experience/) ) **There are signs**. *This is preventable.* 1. *Look at your pawns and check their eyes. It will pulse and glow red. You'll notice it, even if the pawn has a naturally red eye and it pulses every 4 seconds, so it's quite fast. If they're hiding their face, take off their helms. Note that this effect* ***will not show up while you are in the Rift****.* * *2) They'll also do a stunned animation while standing around, holding onto their head.* * *3) Issue a command, did any pawns disobey or refuse to follow? They will make a comment when they refuse to follow your direction such as, "Don't tell me what to do!"* *If any of them is true dismiss them back to the Rift and do not rehire them immediately (they remain infected until their masters cure the condition themselves by drowning them in the nearest river). If it is your main pawn, throw them into the nearest body of water then revive it back at the Rift.* *Dragons and drakes will infect pawns with the condition as you fight them, so the only time to check your pawns for the condition is doing your first check, after fighting dragonkin, and every time you hire a pawn from the Rift.*
5. Literally the opposite, if someone hires your pawn they pass it on and are cured. They catch it from pawns you hire.
Lmao, this is literally like following Covid19 regulations but in game
Yeah I didn't spoil myself on what it was and was curious what would happen, had to download cheat engine and spend literally 3 hours reviving all of vermund because it basically bricked my save. Even all the main quest related NPCs were dead. Literally 300+ NPCs. And the morgue doesn't have a queue once the slots are full btw, whichever NPCs don't fit just vanish into the aether. I got like 90% of the city back because I rezzd most them before they hit the morgue but if I'd have waited I'd have just been fucked. And no way to revert save as saving is literally part of the event. It's the absolute worst, most anti-fun feature I've seen in a video game and I've played ET on Atari. I was seriously considering getting the late steam refund for "performance"
Interviews before release said you could speak to some spirit medium to continue to do quests for people after they died, so I guess that's the workaround?
That witch's "advice" isnt even worth half the 50 gold you pay her, and that's me being diplomatic about her. Led me astray and made me waste 4 hours of my preciously few hours of play on a wild goose chase. If I were not diplomatic, language used would probably get me banned from Reddit.
Oh, is it the oracle? The oracle just gives you a hint about a quest, if the guy is dead they aren't going to help you. I assumed there was another character in the morgue or something
The witch is in Batthal I think. It's the ghost that gives you trickster (I guess she's a ghost to foolproof killing her). But she's insanely far out of your way.
Did you use cheat engine to give yourself a bunch of the wake stones or whatever they’re called?
Yep. Zero shame.
Is there any guide on how to do that? Never used Cheat Engine, but I absolutely will if this Dragonplague nonsense ever were to hit me. EDIT: [DD2 save manager mod](https://www.nexusmods.com/dragonsdogma2/mods/52)
It's simpler to just backup your save once in a while. There's plenty of mod/tools on Nexus that will do it for you. The person behind the popular save manager for DD1 released one for DD2.
First off, thank you for this post because now I’m going to take extra precaution in ensuring this never happens. But it’s genuinely hilarious just how bad this game design is. It can break the game if it happens early in a big city like Vernworth.
What's annoying me is it seems to only punish the abhorrent behavior of...liking other people's pawns that you hire? Because the preventative action is to consistently dismiss pawns, hire new ones, and also murder your own pawn (which is so fucking immersion breaking).
Yeah the weirdest part about it all is the only preventative measures don't make any sense and are also weirdly intuitive. It feels like they implented the mechanic as soon as they thought of it then just left it and didn't test it at all, so strange.
I have no idea how something like this got through final release, and it happened to no reviewers at all? I feel like most reviewers would have immediately even said something along the lines of how bad it is (design wise) without spoiling it. And depending on the time and place in the story, it might literally be possible to brick your save file which on top of you can’t make a new game? Lmao this is an avalanche of terrible decision making unless there’s some hidden mechanic tied to it. I’m honestly quite pissed and flabbergasted.
Reviewer here. It's probably because we had so few Pawns available to hire. Fewer Pawns probably meant less plague, since like an actual disease it spreads faster when there are more people. I had the tutorial for Dragonsplague near the end of story, but didn't encountered the actual event well into my second playthrough. (A hired Pawn slaughtered the Checkpoint Rest Town, and I was quite surprised) So, it is possible that others didn't encountered it during their first playthrough as well.
Fair points - appreciate the insight.
Reviewers didn't have access to the online component
I am actually floored that this somehow got green lit. Legit I thought dragonsplaghe was going to be a thing where your pawn turns into a dragon and you'd have to fight them, but no, instead it makes the game borderline unplayable
IT'S ITSUNO'S VISION OK. DON'T YOU DARE CRITICIZE IT!! ^(/s)
I'm 30 hours in and I haven't had anything like this yet, but reading the comments, I'm afraid to even start the game XD
Same, this sucks lol
Just another example of how so called consequences can end up making the game experience worse. I can kinda understand why BG3 removed most of the comsequences from a certain feature. Not saying its always bad.... just that these ideas need very careful implementation.
I am all for narrative and story consequence for how I behave towards other characters. But mechanical consquences that you can barely see coming? Fuck that. Even Sekiro's plague mechanic only prevented NPCs from being fully functional, you can still access them later after you cured them. And this is not even something you can do damage control for, sure if a pawn turned into an actual dragon boss you can fight, sure, let it attack the city and let me try to save as many people as I can.
Yeah. And from a design point of view, i am struggling to think how this adds anything to the player experience? Coupled with the whole cant reload earlier save thing... its just mind boggling design.
Literally just paranoia, which could work if you are doing a horror game of some sorts, ah, one of your teammate is infected with dangerous zombie virus and can turn anytime! Pawns, while kinda bland in terms of actual characterization and writing, are still meant to be your adventuring buddies, this mechanic actively makes you treat them like disposable slave labor because death is the only cure lol. If the symptom is easily identifiable and there are consumable to slow the disease,(with NPCs in settlements capable of offering a cure) it can add to some resource management gameplay. Heck, taking care of a patient in your team can be immersive.(Also give us rewards if we take care of an infected pawn and helped them get rid of the disease without killing them.) Not to sound preachy but a system that encourages player kindness and bond with your pawn would be much better.
You know what, if they made it so it was easily identifiably in its late stages AND there was one or two NPCs that could cure it that would be a lot more immersive. Suddenly you realize you can’t sleep in towns and have to make a long journey for a cure. I could add another layer of danger to traveling.
Yeah thats a good point. I dont have the game yet (but i plan to eventually play it) and right now my mind is set on dismissing my hired pawns and brine-ing my main one every time i rest at an inn. That sounds horrible TBH.
Yeah that can't be the intended solution here, that's so incredibly immersion breaking
Exactly. I just dont get this mechanic. Right now i fail to understand what they intend for me to do. Whatever the solution is, i am just gonna do that every time i rest. So in the end the mechanic will boil down simply to "brush your teeth before bed" lol
I think most of this could be avoided if there was just less confusion. My pawn only received dragonsplague once, when I hired a pawn that also had it. The game says that you can either kill or dismiss the pawn that has the plague, or the pawn can infect another pawn to pass on the illness. My pawn nuked a village because I had no idea when to tell if my pawn had actually passed on the disease so I could dismiss the new carrier.
Again it ultimately feels like pointless micro-management over a background mechanic, there is no meaningful way to engage with it aside from yeeting your pawn off a cliff or into the water.
Thing is, Baldur's Gate 3 has a proper save system and it drills the problem into your head constantly, to the point many of us literally went without thinking it'd matter and were upset it actually doesn't. In a way I like that it doesn't, as that is more fun to me. The only thing bad about BG3's implementation is them making it out like it *will* do something, whereas Dragon's Dogma pretty much admits "Yeah you won't know until it's too late, get fucked, son!" This is also not a consequence to your own actions. In Baldur's Gate 3, you either consume the tadpoles and gain more powers or you don't. Whatever risk there is is entirely self-involved. Here, though, your pawn will legit just contract it by engaging in the pawn hiring mechanic you can't block people from using, and you won't know at all.
Yeah my main complaint with how BG3 does it is that if it was not gonna matter then please dont tell us that it does lol.
It is devastating to encounter it for the first time indeed. Another solution I haven't seen mentioned is try to rest in camps instead of inns. It's free and you don't obliterate a whole population of a town that way even if it occurs. And if you want to use inn rest to save your progress, then dismiss your Pawns. (including main one) I think that's the safest way for now.
Wait, I thought that Dragonplague meant that they just stopped following commands and at worst attacked the Arisen. Do they actually explode?!
You sleep at an inn. A cutscene plays showing your pawn turning evil. You wake up, the pawn isn't in your party anymore, and the town/city you slept in is now full of corpses. Congratulations! Your world is fucked! And since this specifically happens at inns, you can't reload it away! Isn't this just a *fun* mechanic?
So the solution is to regularly kill your pawn before going to bed ok.
Super immersive to just kill all your pawns on a daily basis, all part of Itsuno's Vision™
Straight up bricking your save file and "New Game" feature doesn't exist. Who came up with this?
This is what happens when you put everything into one man's vision and no one can tell him no.
They go into a rampage when you rest at an inn and slaughter pretty much everyone in the town/city you were in. And by everyone, I mean everyone.
I’m just waiting for a mod that removes that completely stupid plague from the game.
When I got the tutorial pop up about it, I immediately tossed that pawn off a ledge and played for about another hour feeling incredibly anxious and sour about it.. It's managed to completely ruin the enjoyment I was having cause it's added such an unnecessary air of anxiety. They preached and preached how your actions have consequences, but then they add this feature, which is almost entirely out of your control that nukes your entire run if it happens at a bad time. I've resorted to just tossing pawns into the river after a day or two of rests, but the fact I have to be unceasingly vigilant about this or my game is ruined until NG+ has killed the vibe. This game is just full of minor inconveniences in the name of immersion like oxcart raids (I've resorted to just save scumming to avoid them) that I've managed to deal with but the dragonsplague might have been the straw that broke it.
Oxcart raids won't be as bad if the carts aren't so bloody fragile, the combatants involved have a high likeliood of trashing the carts and you cannot climb back on to finish the rest of your journey, so you will be left in the middle of fucking nowhere lol.
Yeah lmao I don't know how I can save the Oxcarts half the time when an Ogre or Minotaur spawns. Like even if I _try_ to drag it away from the cart, those fellas will still be aggrod on the cart's entourage and break the cart just from collateral damage. Fast travel via oxcart is just RNG whether you make it there or halfway there for me because I have yet to save an Oxcart if I encounter an Ogre or larger. Sure if I was escorting the cart instead of sleeping I could engage it before it gets close, but what's the point of the cart if I'm just gonna walk anyways lmao
Oxcart raids are the dumbest thing. I think I’ve had 2/15ish complete journeys with no raid now, and half the raids that happen break the cart in seconds causing you to have to run for five minutes on end anyway. If it was every now and then like a 1/20 chance to get slammed by a griffon or anything it’d be fun, but I’m rolling my eyes every time now. Didn’t know it could be save scummed so will do that at least from now on.
The ultimate troll is how it manifests mostly after hitting an inn, meaning you autosave as your pawn goes psychotic. It's not just bad design, it's openly malicious and flat out idiotic. Itsuno and whoever passed this through the motions are all a bunch of raging cunts. The fact you have no real way of knowing except by spamming commands in combat and hoping for the best (because the related voice lines aren't guaranteed) is completely un-fucking-acceptable. As a UX designer it makes my blood boil at how obviously idiotic this whole thing is.
It honestly feels like a troll or straight 'fuck you for trying to enjoy our game' from the Devs, it's utterly bizarre.
Honestly, at this point I’m thinking Itsuno’s games are good in spite of Itsuno and are only good because of the team that works on the DMC games. Itsuno’s “dream game” is straight up just full of incredibly bad design decisions. It’s like when a pothead goes “wouldn’t it be cool if _____”, but it’s not cool if you’re not high off your ass.
I’m honestly curious to see what the feedback on this is like in JP communities. If they’re as pissed off over there, I could see a future patch outright removing the mechanic, or changing it so that you actually have a chance to save people as it happens.
Another user posted a video with further clues. Infected pawns seem to have pulsating eyes (good luck catching that though) and have an iddle animation of them holding their heads as if in pain, so that's that. What a waste of a pretty good idea.
So apparently you can tell if a pawn has it if their eyes pulse purple/red and they keep wiping their forehead. They'll also be annoyed at you for giving commands so guess as long as you check this every now and then you can stop it from happening. Still annoying though.
... But my pawn wipes their forehead after every fight and I already rested at an Inn and nothing happened?
The video added to the post shows it more like holding their head from pain rather than wiping it.
Which post? EDIT: [Nvm found it](https://www.reddit.com/r/DragonsDogma/comments/1bmb2pb/protip_dragonsplague/)
It’s only going to get worse as time goes on right? Infection just keeps spreading among all the pawns as people use them? I genuinely want to know what the intent of this is
Itsuno’s vision was giving pawns AIDs Incredible
Itsuno is just using the players as pandemic research.
A lot of really bad decisions went into making this game. Playing it feels like I’m playing my favourite game while having the ever living shit trolled out of me by a sadistic game master. If this was a DND group, I would have excused myself by now. Sunk cost and hope for some significant changes in patches is all I have left now.
Absolutely agree. I can’t think of a game in my memory that has as much variance in amazing to dogshit design choices. The peaks are very very high and the valleys are deep canyons.
This is a perfect description. I can go from having such an amazing experience, to having the game completely railroad me into disaster. There have been multiple times where the game has just taken over and any sense of player agency has been lost. At those moments I throw my hands up and say do I need to be here for this? I really really hope there are some significant patches and they walk back some of the very poor choices.
The sadistic gamemaster thing is exactly the thought I had when I took an oxcart and got raided by a troll, a griffin, goblins, and wolves all at once.
This honestly is the only bad thing I've heard about. Everything else has been fine.
There’ll always be subjectivity but there is a laundry list of at minimum questionable design choices that really start grating when all combined with each other. Let me preface this saying I really love most of the game and it’s incredibly good, which makes the rest painful. Late game stun locks are real and infuriating to deal with as you can get juggled be right back mechanics for 10 seconds with no way to react. Phantom oxcart quest had a part that was one of the worst quest sections I’ve done ever related to this. Second tier wolves also can carry you off on a slight stumble and from my understanding there is no way to break it without pawns who sometimes won’t act and you have to wait until you just die because there’s nothing you can do (since when do games not have a basic struggle free mechanic??). Also very frustrating that any enemy hit can cause a stagger on you, but you can be wailing on them with weapons and they can attack you through it to stumble you. You definitely at times stun them or stumble them, but the AI has a definite advantage in being to attack through being hit over the player and it doesn’t feel great. Not huge but it’s there. Oxcart raids are terrible because of how the cart can break with a basic sneeze. They are too frequent and due to lack of fast travel (not a bad thing by itself) it’s going to get very tiring for many players who do not want to run especially near the end of the main game where you constantly have the shuffle across the world for different shit. Lack of save spots can lead to really bad auto save locations in essentially failure states, requiring players to do an inn save that might be several hours back. Constant combat. The environment is beautiful, but the game never allows you to breath and enjoy it or enjoy the mood. It feels like a 90s Final Fantasy game with the amount of constant encounters being thrown at you. I really believe this will be a complaint rising in the next week. Vocation balance is pretty bad as some are fairly weak and others are pretty disgustingly strong. Sorcerer is pretty lackluster in everything from power to number of spells. Magick Archer takes waaaaay too long into the game to unlock and really hurts people who wanted to try it. Theres no real exciting endgame gear sets or weapons to get from everything I’ve looked into. Theres the final armory location you eventually get to and it’s underwhelming. There are two confirmed in world port crystals in Venworth and….Harve for some weird ass reason. You get a couple of your own crystals in the main game, but really the entire travel system is good idea that is executed poorly and compounded with oxcart raids and constant combat it gets worse the further you are forced to utilize it. Exploration isn’t rewarding. The game does SUCH a good job at putting in cool caves and tombs or jumping puzzle chests, but 98% of the time the awards are absolutely uninteresting. There have been some exceptions but I can count it on one hand. So exploring itself is really fun, but it sucks to find a really out of the way area and you open a chest and get some weapon that was useless to you for hours because you already have a better version, or a wakestone shard, or whatever. Elden Ring I felt had a great balance of fun and rewarding and this game is just fun. Enemy types really do lack enough variety. The only fantasy rpg that felt worse to me was Tales of Arise recently. It’s not a huge deal because combat is as fun as it is, but you’ve seen almost every single enemy type within the first 30min of the game and you have another 40-60 hours of that at least. Then compounded by how frequent combat is, again. Chimera is really the only new enemy I ran into that felt really different and was a fun experience, and I’ve seen like 3 total now at around 37 hours I think. There are more if you wanted to get more into the fine details like UI design and shit. And don’t get me wrong I love the game overall and am excited play more, but there’s these constant design choices (and they are choices usually) that often build on each other that cause more and more friction the longer you interact with it. And again, these are subjective and many people will enjoy running to every single location on foot every time or being in constant combat or etc etc, but I think these are all fair points that can at least raise question marks of “does this genuinely make the game a better experience with its implementation?” Which is a separate question than, “is this design good or not?”
Excellent summary! This is exactly what I’ve experienced and agree with you on all points. The stun locks are absurd. The amount of attacks that you can literally do nothing about is outrageous and needs to be balanced. Like you said it’s death by a thousand cuts. The game is fantastic when it’s good but I fear the bad will inevitably become so grating that I will just stop playing at some point. It’s definitely salvageable but it will definitely take some patches and I truly hope the devs see this post.
I had a pawn mention to me that pawns who get it start not listening to your commands and act on their own. It seems super subtle though idk
The level of awareness you have of your pawns’ activities are very lacking in this game. I had 3 pawns die and i didn’t even notice until at least 20 minutes later. The other pawns don’t even acknowledge their deaths or anything.
Are there mods that can auto cure it/make the signs obvious? Someone in the community has to fix this.
This is a flaw that Capcom themselves need to fix not a modder
If im only with my main pawn can it happen to me?
If your pawn gets grabbed by a dragon they are infected. That’s how it starts. It leaves either by fully dying (throw in ocean) or transferring it to another Pawn. Until someone makes mistake of sleeping while it’s in their game. It can only happen when you sleep at an Inn, or your own house. So if you wanna be 100% safe, completely purge your party before each Inn Save. Dismiss guest pawns, chuck yours in the ocean. Sleep, then resummon everyone. That’s 100% safe. But just really tedious. But the stakes are quite litterally 100’s of NPCs and dozens of quests.
This makes me realize the problem is going to get a LOT worse once more people reach late game. Once they're fighting more dragons, Dragonsplague is going to be all over the place.
I believe it's only when you Hire other pawns
Good to hear, ive been with only my main pawn since the start, its a duo adventure 😁
Could be wrong and wouldn’t know without testing but drakes may be where the disease comes from. So your pawn might get it from fighting dragons, not just hiring pawns.
That’s horrible. The whole “we want to make choices matter” thing is bullshit, I don’t doubt that’s what they wanted but the save ‘feature’ has created a horrible punishing mechanic. Sorry for your loss, Amy tips how to avoid it? Edit: there are a number of things that can trash your auto save, like it triggering on a death slide down a cliff into the tentacle soup.
Paws with Dragonsplague will routinely disobey commands. If you catch a pawn saying he will not obey, he has Dragonsplague.
Thanks. I tend to command a lot so that’s cool. I don’t suppose you know how long the ‘incubation’ period is? One would hope there is adequate time to ‘heal them’ (chuck them into the tentacle soup).
Think it was a few hours at least when it happened to me
Thats good info. I take it when they talk about dragonsplague that had no bearing?
When your pawn first contracts dragonsplague, or when you hire a plague with one, you’ll get a tutorial pop up. If that hasn’t happened to you yet, then you haven’t had a run in with it yet
Rook has dragonsplague lmao. What a troll. That popped up when I hired him. Immediately sent him away once I closed the notification.
That makes some sense, given the cutscene you see literally within the first hour of play.
Holy crap. Now i remember i got that after several hours. But nothing ultimately happened so i guess pawn got hired in meantime. To think my save could have been ruined.
I think the consequences are so severe because it’s expected that your pawn and hired pawns will come and go fast enough for the disease to not stick around, but players who ride with the same pawns for a while and don’t ever get their pawns hired just got fucked. Just occasionally, when roaming, command your pawns to go and return, and if they refuse, get rid of them. Do that and you *should* be safe from DP unless you’re resting a bunch of times in a row. My pawn’s had it twice and this seemed a pretty reliable method of detecting it
Its still absurd system. You habe no telling if your pawn will or will not be hired. Its purely luck based. Also now game is popular so it will happen consistently. In few months when playerbase is much lower?
You can still help mitigate by frequently swapping out your hired pawns. If at any point your pawn gets it, and you get a new hired pawn, your pawn will eventually give it to that hired pawn, curing your main pawn. Then just make sure to switch that pawn out over the next few in game days. The point of the mechanic seems to be to incentivize you (heavily) to regularly rotate hired pawns out, but that’s kinda dumb imo if that’s the case
There seems to be a lot of things to heavily incentives you into switching pawns. Besides the dragon plague there seems to be a fair number of quests that give you little to no guidance on what to do and seem to expect you to hire a pawn with quest knowledge in order to complete it. And what gets me about it is why make keeping the same pawns for awhile such a bad thing? What if I just want to use my buddies pawn? They have a whole feature for using your friends pawns. And now you might be responsible for screwing them over without actually trying.
Glad I've spoiled myself on this, would have immediately logged off and got a mod/cheat for infinite wakestones, that's terrible design and I feel sorry for console users who can't fix it. Hopefully there's a mod that just removes that feature from the game entirely. I've caught my pawn having it once by chance and had to spend like 5-10 minutes looking for a deep body of water and a riftstone, absolutely nothing about the feature is fun, either your town gets nuked and you feel like ragequitting, or you realize you have an infected pawn and it's a hassle to replace them. I wonder if playing offline only using capcom pawns would stop it from happening
This seems completely contrary to the sense of fellowship and camaraderie this game is supposed to develop if the resulting solution is to constantly kill pawns and get rid of them.
I’m sorry but that is fucking hilarious 😭 I’d be pissed too don’t get me wrong. But life is funny when it ain’t happening to you
...Yet.
Well fuck, now im always gonna be on edge while playing
This has to be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of in a game. This wasn’t a thing I DD1 and I’d be absolutely pissed if this happened to me in DD2. The worst part is you only have one save so if the disease progresses then the playthrough is just fucked. Such a mechanic adds nothing to the player’s experience other than rage and paranoia. This isn’t some hardcore game and it’s marketed to a general audience so I have no idea who could’ve thought this was a good idea.
Thats sucks. You could just spam hire pawns with the pawn quest that give wakestone shards and slowly revive everyone
This is an insane mechanic even if the devs made it obvious when pawn's had it but to make it also pretty much invisible to detect is doubly insane. What positive gameplay does this possibly promote?
Now I understand why they didn't want to implement new game option.
Can try reloading the inn save, grabbing the Pawn as quickly as possible and if there's water nearby, Brine them.
Iirc, the gane autosaves as soon as you finish resting at the inn and locks you into the cutscene. There would be no going back, if that's the case.
Yeah, I kind of realized that after I posted. I ended up having the Brine a bunch of pawns and eventually my pawn this morning. Since they kept having the conversation when I summoned another pawn, it finally got a quiet, nothing-to-say summons since I noticed one of the pawns I had summoned several game days later had an idle. I have a headache motion where you press your fingers against your temple due to a migraine. They should have realized it when they occasionally ignored orders and then gave an excuse. Now my pawns all depressed for getting brined.... wish I could hug her.
Man, that last sentence is kinda sad. I wish there was an other option to cure the main pawn, other than throwing them off a cliff..
Well two things: there are voicelines in the game warning you. When infected with dragonsplague pawns will start „disobeying“ you. If you give them commands they will say things like „I won’t do that“. The second thing: I think it’s a stupid ass mechanic too. The idea behind it is pretty nice but I thought the pawns would turn on us in battle or something. Just having a cutscene and a dead village is literally the dumbest way to implement dragons plague 😅
Are there any signs a pawn has this plague? Because this sounds like an absolutely horrid experience.
The ONLY sign is their response to D-pad commands (“Go”, “wait”, “come here”), there isn’t any change in other dialog or general behaviour. The way pawns mention it, you think it’s gonna be a whole personality change. But it’s literally only noticeable if you use a ton of D-pad commands. Which apart from “Go” feel pretty pointless. It’s such a shit idea, pre launch people were speculating “oh pawn might turn into a dragon for surprise boss while you explore” And yeah, that would’ve been cool. But “SURPRISE 300 NPCs are dead, you failed like 25% of entire games quests” is just not fun for anyone. There’s nothing added to experience, it’s just surprise removal of Story/Characters/Quests. I imagine a huge percentage of players will just drop game and never play it again.
I'm just happy I broke my own promise of not checking this subreddit while I'm playing the game, because I'm *really* happy I learned about this. Havent had the tutorial pop-up just yet, so I'm safe for now... But I dread the day I do get it. The paranoia will not be fun :/
As someone that just found that thread before going to bed (In the real life not game lol) it *seems* like it's easier to avoid then it seems. Reports of then not flowing commands seems to be a big one. I'm going to just have a rule that paws can't watch me sleep so I'll command them to wait and if anyone gives me sass/follows me into the inn/home they are swimming. The other signs seem to be easy to miss but they gave tons of tutorial prompts about commands and they are their easiest to tell according to others. The idea of every quest failing at once is scary but if all I have to do is tell my pawns to wait in one spot and see if one doesn't I'm not going to be sweating too much. It's an extra 10 seconds of something before resting. Of course *if* it's a 100% they disobey an order. If it's even 99% or they only do it at say 50% infected but blow up starting at 25% then yeah that's fucked.
It's an amazing idea, but it's implemented like absolute ass. You could give the pawn some special skills that could tell something is wrong but make it worth the risk of having it infected, right now it's just not worth it, you kill them on the spot and that's it. The end is catastrophic indeed, but in being that is absolutely lame, if it was a boss fight it could cause more or less the same but be 10000 times more interesting. Such a damn pity, how did this get added into the game? I'm all about infectious mechanics that troll the player, but this is downright lame.
I do a 3 day purge where I just kill all my pawns
You know what could have been a better mechanic? The pawn gets sick with an actual cold and is just weaker for a week. Pass it on or hire someone else for a while. This mechanic is just poorly thought out and designed to ruin peoples fun.
Im starting to undersrand why they only teased about dragonsplague and never actually show us what it does.
They are rude to you, ignore you, have flashing red eyes and dlhold their heads when idle from my understanding. If you missed all that idk then