Video Games

Capcom traced Dragon’s Dogma 2’s performance issues back to big-brained NPCs and fixed them, thankfully

Dragon’s Dogma 2’s performance issues are, hopefully, a thing of the past, as Capcom found the RPG’s biggest hurdle: NPCs who think

Josh Broadwell

Capcom/GLHF

Dragon’s Dogma 2’s performance issues are, hopefully, a thing of the past, as Capcom found the RPG’s biggest hurdle: NPCs who think. That’s every NPC in Dragon’s Dogma 2, and all those brain cells require processing power, which ends up bogging the game down in places where you find a lot of people.

Famitsu conducted an interview with unnamed members of the development team who explained the problem and said the recent Dragon’s Dogma 2 patch should help consoles hit higher, stable framerates now (thanks, IGN).

“In sequences where many NPCs appear at the same time, such as in towns, the load on the CPU was very high, which affected the frame rate,” Capcom’s developers said. “Because the CPU was the bottleneck, reducing the load on the GPU side, such as lowering the resolution, had little effect on improving the frame rate. 

“[We have been] reviewing the processing of NPC thoughts and making fine adjustments such as the execution order of each process in updates since the release.”

The result of that review is the recent patch’s fix. Performance mode on PS5 and Xbox Series X should let you reach and maintain 50-60fps, while the Series S should be able to manage 35-40fps. Graphics mode targets are lower, of course – 30-40fps on PS5 and Series X and 30-35fps on Series S.

The recent Dragon’s Dogma 2 performance update also applies to the game’s Steam version, though you’ll need to toggle the in-game graphics settings to see results.

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Josh Broadwell
JOSH BROADWELL

Josh is a freelance writer and reporter who specializes in guides, reviews, and whatever else he can convince someone to commission. You may have seen him on NPR, IGN, Polygon, or Rolling Stone shouting about RPGs. When he isn’t working, you’ll likely find him outside with his Belgian Malinois and Australian Shepherd or leveling yet another job in FFXIV.

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