Dragon’s Dogma 2 releases Friday, and the pre-release reviews are promising. However, as Capcom has admitted, performance is one area with room for improvement. While the developers are working on that, some fans plan to fix it by offing NPCs en masse.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 players discuss killing NPCs to boost framerate
Dragon’s Dogma 2 features uncapped framerate on all platforms, but the sheer amount of content can strain performance. While PC users have the most significant problems, even the P55 and Xbox Series X versions sometimes dip below 30 FPS. According to Capcom, the game’s NPCs are a big part of the problem since they rely on a complex system to determine their behavior. Players may notice a significant drop in framerate in scenes with many NPCs.
However, as GamesRadar noticed, some fans are already planning to kill NPCs to improve performance. NPCs in Dragon’s Dogma 2 will stay dead unless revived. Since they are such a massive CPU sink, it stands to reason that players could improve framerate by culling unimportant characters.
It’s unclear if that would actually work, but that hasn’t stopped fans from tossing the idea around. While the discussion is mostly tongue-in-cheek, suggestions include making a community list of Dragon’s Dogma 2’s most disposable NPCs. At least one person wondered if this might create a new genre of speedrun where players ice NPCs for better framerates.
While this situation might seem strange, it’s actually not unique. For example, the sandbox strategy game Crusader Kings 3 also suffers from performance issues due to its staggering number of NPCs. As most players will tell you, reducing the number of characters does wonders for its framerate. That doesn’t necessarily mean it would work for the upcoming Dragon’s Dogma 2, but it would hardly be unprecedented.
