Spearheaded by Devil May Cry director Hideaki Itsuno, Dragon’s Dogma is often overlooked in the list of last-gen’s best RPGs. Inspired by western goliaths like Skyrim, Capcom challenged itself to create its own fantasy epic, powered by its own proprietary technology. PC and current-gen console ports followed, culminating in the arrival of this fascinating Switch conversion.
Developed over the course of three years, Dragon’s Dogma runs on MT Framework – common to most of Capcom’s last-gen titles. Using the limited resources of PS3 and Xbox 360 at the time, the team made a rare push for a fully open world design. Ultimately though, while the mechanics hang together well enough, the frame-rate struggled on those machines. Pop-in was an issue and texture quality wasn’t the best, possibly limited by the 512MB of RAM common to both last-gen PlayStation and Xbox platforms.
The good news is that the Switch version has more in common with the current-gen remasters than it does with the original release. Docking the machine with a TV shows a marked upgrade in several respects. The last-gen highlights remain – crepuscular rays and dynamic shadows looked good then and they still do now. Light flits beautifully between trees, cast from grey skies blanketing the game’s opening scenes. Meanwhile, character shadows are a real feature of undergrounds dungeons and night battles – torchlight creates sharp, directional shadows, much in the same way Dark Souls 2’s characters cast silhouettes on around bonfires. It gives light a great sense of impact to these scenes, where lanterns are often crucial to making progress.
Upgrades are present on top of a robust last-gen foundation. Native resolution is pushed higher on Switch to 1600×900 while docked. At 900p it’s a more than passable experience that works on modern 1080p TVs and it retains a similar post anti-aliasing setup to the original game. That’s a big upgrade on the 1280×608 image on PlayStation 3, for example. Switch also retains the true 16:9 aspect ratio of the remasters, as opposed to the letterboxed ‘filmic’ 2.35:1 presentation of the launch code. It’s a full-on improvement, although inevitably it falls short of the PS4 version’s full 1080p image.