The graphics didn’t especially astound me during my preview ofDragon’s Dogma 2. It’s still early days for the game, and there’s clearly a lot of fine-tuning to do with animations and lipsync, but I was pleased enough with the graphical leaps from the first title. Nothing seemed too out of the ordinary. Nothing all that good, nothing bad enough to report on. Until I saw the steak.
There I was, with my little lion-faced Beastren Arisen, about to chill out by the fire at a camp I had liberated from goblins when I decided to use the cooking pot. All normal stuff, select your ingredients and cook. All of a sudden, it was like watching some Marks & Spencer food ad. Flames licked the screen as a mouth-watering steak sizzled in the background.
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I’m still trying to figure out if it was unbelievably detailed graphics or real footage of a fat, tasty steak. You’d think this would be a simple case of asking “Hey, is this real?”, but this steak is far more mysterious than that. My colleague Tessa Kaur is currently at the Tokyo Game Show and was able to sit down with the Dragon’s Dogma 2 devs. They asked whether the camp food was real or CGI and were told, “Glad you liked it, draw your own conclusions,” which is just ‘no comment’ with a fancy hat on. When the topic arose later in their demo, again any chatter of food was swatted away. The team “weren’t really focusing on the food that much,” and added food to the game at all because of real-life camping and cooking. When I asked my PR contact, they similarly struggled to get a straight answer.
The strange thing is, this is impressive either way. If it’s real, this is mind-boggling visual tech unlike anything we’ve seen before, and if it’s fake, the team went out of their way to curate and film the perfect steak for the game. Were chefs hired for this? Did Capcom have some kind of fancy steak budget for the food scenes? I need to know, but it doesn’t seem like it’s a topic the team are particularly loquacious on.
I’m more curious than ever now. How many food possibilities are there? How many scenes of succulent meals cooking over an open fire can we watch? Will there be a cookbook when the game launches? I was trying to play as efficiently as possible to make the most of the small amount of time I had, so I wasn’t looting enemies much. I only specifically looted the minotaur because I thought he might drop something noteworthy. By the time I camped, I had two ingredients on me — Dried Meat and Beast-Steak, and I went for the latter for that sweet, sweet taste of minotaur. Now I wish I had looted everything.
As a community and fandom, we often latch on to the weird and wonderful to meme and discuss, and for Dragon’s Dogma 2, the food is going to be a talking point. I don’t know how limited these food scenes will be, or even if they’re real. Maybe you’re able to only cook steak rather than the whole smorgasbord of options players could whip up over the campfire in Final Fantasy 15. One thing I do know is that regardless of whether this is CGI or real footage, people will be talking about it a lot. Even if the devs won’t.
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