Game Theory: Dragon's Dogma 2 pulls one of the meanest video game tricks we've ever seen

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

[Note: This column contains spoilers for pretty much the worst thing that can happen to you in Dragon’s Dogma 2.]

There’s a class of things that can really only happen in video games—those wondrous, low-consequence wonderlands—that we’d loosely refer to as “Very amusing things to hear about happening to someone else.” And, look, we know: That whole concept flies in the face of the Golden Rule, the categorical imperative, whatever philosophy you ascribe to that says nothing can be inherently good if you wouldn’t want it happening to you or someone you love, instead of some poor schmuck relaying it in mournful tones on the internet. But even so, as bad people with black hearts, it happens sometimes: A tale of gaming misfortune that evokes in us the bad kind of laugh.

Dragon’s Dogma 2's Dragonsplague is the kind of thing that’s built to enjoy solely by having it happen to someone else.

We touched on the “Dragonsplague” mechanic a bit in our review of the (genuinely very good!) new action role-playing game, but only in vague terms—not out of deference to review embargoes, but because we honestly didn’t know what the damn thing did. Capcom certainly wasn’t telling us, and in 40 hours with the game, we’d only gotten a single pop-up (and some endlessly repetitive NPC dialogue) warning us about the possibility of it having some horrifying impact on our games: A virtual disease, capable of being passed between the game’s primary sidekicks, the normally docile pawns, which would at first make them disobedient and unruly…and then provide a gateway to a “devastating calamity.”

If we’re being honest, it kind of sounded like bullshit. We’ve played games before that threaten these kinds of dire consequences just to invoke a sense of paranoia and consequence in the player—looking at you, Sekiro’s Dragonrot—without actually having the teeth to enforce something genuinely nasty on the players. It seemed better than even odds that Dragon’s Dogma 2 was bluffing, trying to get us to buy into its sense of mystical and existential unease with a trumped up “calamity.”

But here’s the thing about Dragon’s Dogma 2's Dragonsplague: It’s not just bad; it’s so much worse than anyone could have reasonably expected.

The initial symptoms of Dragonsplague are pretty benign. Your Pawn—either your primary “Main” one, or one you’re renting from another player online—will start getting lippy with you. They might ignore an order in combat; they’ll almost certainly start gripping their heads, or exhibiting subtly glowing red eyes. And that’ll be the full extent of it… until a few hours later, when you rest at one of the game’s inns, and the Pawn in question explodes, in a nimbus of black, dragon-shaped fire, taking nearly every living thing in the town with it. Shopkeepers, dead. Quest givers, dead. Plot-critical NPCs, dead. And character death in Dragon’s Dogma 2 isn’t some simple thing to reverse, either: It requires a precious and rare item to undo even a single death, while reviving a whole town, especially if the Plague popped in a capital city, is basically impossible. Don’t think you can revert your single saved game, either—the game executes a hard save every time you rest in an inn. Which is what you just did. Right before your hired hand went nuclear.

In the week or so since the game came out, there have been a lot of questions—some of them very angry questions—from players about why Capcom would institute this as a mechanic in the 40-hour video game they’re currently devoting their precious leisure time to. Trigger Dragonsplague at the wrong time, and in the wrong place—whether through ignorance, confusion, or general obliviousness—and you could be cutting yourself off from more than a dozen of the game’s quest; whole elements of the plot can be wiped out in a single blast of black eldritch fire. So why do it? Is it meant to punish players who try to hire high-level Pawns to help them roll through early fights? (People seem to think pawns initially catch Dragonsplague through fights with dragon enemies; it’d stand to reason that pawns recruited from later in the game might be more likely to carry it.) Is it meant to encourage engagement with the game’s New Game Plus system, which allows you to replay the adventure with your old character, and a new copy of the world? (“Whoops, just bio-bombed Vernworth. Better luck next life, citizenry!”) Is it just pure, straight-up trolling (enforced by the game’s deliberately limited save system)? Or does it serve a deeper thematic purpose?

As we noted in our review, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a video game about struggle, about the difficulty of even just getting somewhere. No institution can be fully trusted, no action taken without at least a hint of unintended consequences. And you, as the mythical Arisen—condemned to either follow the path of fate, or risk everything in defiance of it—are uniquely suited to both suffering these consequences, and bringing them down on other people’s heads. The first Dragon’s Dogma toyed with introducing that same sense of threat, of untrustworthiness, to the almost pathologically servile pawns by giving dragon-type enemies the ability to corrupt them temporarily mid-fight; Dragonsplague can be seen as a thematic sequel to that concept, with your greatest and most loyal allies being a potential source of the most horrifying, game-altering devastation. Nothing can be trusted.

And yet, DD 2 is also a game about people coming together to fend off apocalyptic threats—which, we’d argue, is exactly what the game’s players have done in response to this mysterious, deliberately poorly-explained illness. The internet is filling up with warnings and guides for how to spot Dragonsplague—reddit posts filled with information (and occasional disinformation) about how it can be identified, spread, or treated. (Death, and only death, by the way; sorry, infected pawns.) Videos are spreading with the vital info. Hell, articles like this one exist.People are working hard to take a Dragonsplague explosion from something that catches unaware players off guard to something predictable, preventable—just a story of something terrible that happened to someone else. There’s something kind of cosmically beautiful about that (as long as it never happens to us, of course).