Dragon's Dogma 2: Off to a good start on Steam, but users are angry

Dragon's Dogma 2 has finally been released and the initial player numbers have been exhilarating. Early user reviews were even lower, with only 40 percent of reviews on Steam being positive.

Dragon's Dogma 2, at least according to early reviews, appears to be one of the best games of the year. The numbers for the first two players also look very positive. On Steam, more than 184,000 players were playing the game at the same time, pushing the title straight into the top 10 most played games of the past 24 hours.

This far exceeds the launch of its predecessor, at the time only 27,368 players could dive into the game at the same time and newer releases like Granblue Fantasy: Relink (114,054) and Persona 3 Reload (45,002) couldn't keep up.

However, satisfaction looks different, because Dragon's Dogma 2 is currently heavily discounted in user reviews – only 40 percent of reviews are positive. It's not just about game performance, Capcom has already admitted that areas with a lot of NPCs make CPUs sweat. Denuvo's controversial copy protection is also a thorn in the side of many.

However, the main point of criticism is microtransactions, which players have now discovered but apparently were not previously reported by Capcom. It's not clear whether this or their mere presence is causing players' anger. For example, more than twenty microtransactions have been listed for Dragon's Dogma 2 on Steam, with a total value of more than €40. They range from character editing to fast travel and from resurrection to “Rift Crystals” – an in-game currency.

Above all, the fact that gameplay elements like fast travel or character changes appear in microtransactions blows people's minds. “Why can I only create one character and then have to pay €2 to customize it again? How greedy do you have to be,” one review said. Another calls microtransactions in the single-player game “predatory.”

It will be interesting to see if and how Capcom reacts to the review bombing.