It’s far from the biggest RPG ever made, but Dragon’s Dogma inspired a cult following like few other games, who finally saw their patience rewarded with a sequel in 2024. Now, Dragon’s Dogma 2 has crossed a huge sales threshold a year after release, and players are hoping that the best part of the original game could be coming to the sequel, too.
This week, Capcom announced that Dragon’s Dogma 2 passed 4 million sales on November 5. While that’s not a huge number compared to Capcom’s other major titles, it’s still half the number of copies that the original Dragon’s Dogma has sold since its release in 2012, but achieved in a single year. For Dragon’s Dogma, that figure also includes sales of its DLC expansion, Dark Arisen, making the number for Dragon’s Dogma 2 even more impressive.
The existence of that expansion also raises some questions for the future of Dragon’s Dogma 2. While the original release of Dragon’s Dogma had plenty of immediate fans, it’s the launch of Dark Arisen that helped turn it into a cult classic. Rather than being sold as an addition to the base game, the expansion essentially replaced the original, with Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen containing the entire first game plus an expansive endgame dungeon called Bitterblack Isle. Instead of the typically sprawling locations the rest of Dragon’s Dogma take place in, Bitterblack Isle is a maze of cramped corridors, filled with monsters far more difficult than most of what was contained in the base game. It also adds quasi-roguelike elements with randomly placed items that change whenever you dive into the dungeon.
In some ways, Dragon’s Dogma 2 feels like a second shot at Dragon’s Dogma. The sequel largely repeats and refines elements of the first game, with a grander adventure made possible by ten-plus years of technological progress rather than a major reinvention of the core gameplay. It also includes an incredible, surprising endgame that’s never even hinted at until you finish the main campaign, which feels as transformative as Dark Arisen itself did.
Dragon’s Dogma needed Dark Arisen to become the cult hit that it eventually did, but Dragon’s Dogma 2 already seems like a complete experience on its own. Despite some performance issues on PC and a couple of bizarrely contrived controversies surrounding microtransactions and the devious Dragonsplague mechanic, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an extremely ambitious game that mostly lives up to the expectations that waiting more than a decade for a sequel spawned.
There are more logistical obstacles to a potential Dragon’s Dogma 2 expansion, too. Hideaki Itsuno directed both Dragon’s Dogma games, but left Capcom a few months after Dragon’s Dogma 2 launched. Without the series’ creator at the developer, getting another DLC together could be a much bigger challenge. On the other hand, Itsuno didn’t actually direct Dark Arisen either. The expansion was directed by Kento Kinoshita, who also served as a designer on Dragon’s Dogma 2. If Capcom did have interest in developing DLC for Dragon’s Dogma 2, it’s entirely possible that Kinoshita could once again take the helm.
So far, though, there have been no hints that such a project is even being considered. This year, Capcom has seemed much more focused on supporting Monster Hunter Wilds — the developer’s other massive, combat-focused RPG with persistent performance issues. And while four million copies sold is still a success, it’s not one on the scale a company the size of Capcom may have been hoping for. For comparison, Monster Hunter Wilds has sold more than ten million copies since its launch this February, and that’s not even a particularly good figure for the series.
For now, we can’t assume that Dragon’s Dogma 2 will be getting any kind of followup, but it may be a good time to check out the game as it is today. With Capcom celebrating its sales so far, it may be possible that the developer hasn’t entirely given up on the game yet.
