Wild Dragon's Dogma 2 mod overhauls lighting and shadows by unlocking a path tracing mode that Capcom never finished

A new Dragon's Dogma 2 mod has enabled path tracing in Capcom's huge action-RPG, and it looks really impressive.

Capcom's new game is apparently hiding an unfinished path trace rendered within it, and one modder has managed to turn it on and get it working. You'd never know Dragon's Dogma 2 had the unfinished feature if this modder hadn't dug it up in the game's files and tinkered around with the entire path tracing mode to get it up and running.

The mod can be downloaded over on NexusMods, and it looks so good that it's caught the attention of tech experts Digital Foundry. In the video below, the outlet showcases the mod in great detail, showing how it effectively overhauls the RPG's lighting to bring hugely enhanced detail to aspects like buildings and characters throughout Dragon's Dogma 2.

Because aspects like lighting are enhanced via the mod, shadows also receive far greater attention than they normally would in vanilla Dragon's Dogma 2. Even things like armor look jaw-dropping when the mod is installed, as do character models including the player Arisen, Pawns, and NPCs scattered throughout the towns and cities in the open world.

However, the mod isn't without its issues. As Digital Foundry showcases above, the indirect path tracing lighting means that some items on the ground effectively have the literal ground taken out from beneath them, and consequently look like they're floating in mid-air as a result. This is all pretty reasonable stuff, considering the feature within Dragon's Dogma 2 itself was found in an unfinished state.

Obviously, frame rates will take a beating thanks to the mod. An Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 can play Dragon's Dogma 2 at 105 frames per second as standard, but this plummets to 42FPS depending on which aspects of the mod you're utilizing. At worst, you could be playing Dragon's Dogma 2 at just 20FPS with the full-fat version of the mod.

Dragon's Dogma 2 has helped me tackle my anxiety in a way few RPGs have managed to, and it was completely unexpected.