GTA 5 and its flexible open-world design helped inspire Dragon's Dogma 2's vast RPG world

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Hideaki Itsuno explains his personal inspiration

Dragon's Dogma 2
(Image credit: Capcom)

Dragon's Dogma 2's vast open world has a very surprising source of inspiration: Rockstar's GTA 5.

Speaking to GamesRadar+ , Dragon's Dogma 2 game director Hideaki Itsuno spoke about his personal inspiration for elements of the new action-RPG. "GTA 5 was quite a big inspiration for me on the level of how it manages to combine multiple emergent gameplay systems into a satisfying experience that feels free to the player in terms of their freedom of what they can choose to do," Itsuno said. 

The Capcom veteran also pointed to GTA 5's "flexibility of how it manages multiple overlapping events." For example, says Itsuno, you could be doing something that spirals wildly out of control, and it overlaps with whatever's surrounding it in the game world. "The game manages that; it doesn't crash, it doesn't kick you out of one thing and put you in the other, it just lets it all mash together in a way that is of course sometimes chaotic, but always feels like it's intentional," added Itsuno. 

Itsuno's hit on something the GTA serious is arguably famous for: Letting players rampage around its open worlds in bouts of carnage, with police and army forces in tow. I've lost count of the amounts of times I've been hunted down in GTA 5 after a fight has rapidly blown out of control, and just like Itsuno says, the surrounding world adapts to the chaos. 

"And [that] sort of intentionality in emergent gameplay and open world design is something that I was incredibly impressed by at the time that game came out, and that kind of experience is something I've been aiming to provide in Dragon's Dogma 2," Itsuno concluded on the matter.

On the subject of the vast open world, Dragon's Dogma 2's map is four times the size of that of the original RPG. What's more, we know that Dragon's Dogma 2 still won't feature fast traveling around its open world, just like the first game didn't, because Itsuno previously said that games only need the feature if their worlds are "boring."

Here's hoping that potential Dragon's Dogma 2 demo isn't far off - and is actually real.

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Hirun Cryer
Hirun Cryer

Hirun Cryer is a freelance reporter and writer with Gamesradar+ based out of U.K. After earning a degree in American History specializing in journalism, cinema, literature, and history, he stepped into the games writing world, with a focus on shooters, indie games, and RPGs, and has since been the recipient of the MCV 30 Under 30 award for 2021. In his spare time he freelances with other outlets around the industry, practices Japanese, and enjoys contemporary manga and anime.

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