Dragon's Dogma was a 2012 fantasy Action RPG directed by the DMC3 director and Capcom veteran Hideaki Itsuno. While it failed to meet Capcom's original sales expectations, it quickly grew into a cult hit and received both an updated re-release with new content in Dark Arisen as well as receiving multiple ports to other platforms over the years. It even spawned a Japan-only MMO that ran for several years before being shut down. Most importantly, however, a true-to-form sequel was recently announced with Hideaki Itsuno again at the head of development.
While Dragon's Dogma doesn't sell itself on its story, open world, or large quantity of content, it does have perhaps the best combat in any Action RPG thanks to its responsive controls, numerous strategies, unique climbing mechanics, and our topic for today: enemy design. Dragon's Dogma not only excels in creating enemies with unique and engaging gameplay designs, but breathes an air of authentic classicism into each enemy through both visuals and gameplay. Dragon's Dogma doesn't seek to redefine the classic fantasy that inspired it, but to hone and polish it to perfection through its design choices. Here, I'll be focusing on one aspect in particular: Enemy Weaknesses.
The Basics of Enemy Weaknesses
Like many RPGs, enemies in Dragon's Dogma are weak against certain types of attacks and tactics. However, Dragon's Dogma expands on more traditional elemental/status effect weaknesses to create four categories: Elemental Weakness, Status Weakness, Physiological Weakness, and Tactical Weakness. Elemental weaknesses are one of the most common types in RPGs, with enemies who take a greater or lesser amount of damage from various damage types. Status Weaknesses are similarly common, with enemies being more or less resistant to various status effects. Physiological weaknesses are somewhat more rare, however, with enemies taking different amounts of damage depending on where they are hit. Finally, tactical weaknesses are just particular strategies used to manipulate enemy behavior to make them easier to beat; this is often the result of emergent gameplay, but is sometimes invoked deliberately.
Now, while these four weakness types are by no means exclusive to Dragon's Dogma. Many fully 3D titles utilize this set of weaknesses, but Dragon's Dogma takes several more steps to greater realize its enemies.
Damage-Based Weaknesses aren't Just More Damage
While many games with elemental and physiological weaknesses simply increase the damage of attacks that target those weaknesses, Dragon's Dogma adds an additional layer for most creatures. Exploiting these weaknesses typically results in a change in enemy behavior. For a physiological example, you can deal extra damage to a cyclops by attacking its eye, but this also enrages the cyclops for a brief time, increasing its aggression and changing its attack patterns. For an elemental example, attacking a Griffon in flight with fire attacks will cause its wings to burst into flames, making it crash into the ground. Nearly every single enemy has both physiological and elemental weaknesses that alter their behavior in similar ways, often taking inspiration from the myths and stories that inspired them.
Status Weaknesses are Powerful
Many RPGs have issues with status effects not being that useful due to either being too random (A status effect that kills 10% of the time is less efficient than simply killing an enemy the old-fashioned way), poor scalability (a DoT that does 10 damage/sec won't scale into an endgame where basic attacks deal 1000), or never having a real use case (it's not worth using on weak enemies but strong enemies are outright immune). In Dragon's Dogma, this is far from the case. Most enemies can be affected by status ailments, and the large chunk of enemies with status weaknesses are absolutely demolished by them. Status effects like Torpor are useful on nearly every enemy, Sleep can win fights it's effective in practically by itself, and Silence can drastically reduce the threat posed by spellcaster enemies. While there are some status effects that are either not particularly powerful (Drenched/Aneled) and those that, while strong, are not easily applied (Petrification/Curse), attacks that deal status ailments remain a useful part of the player's repertoire throughout the entire game.
Tactics are Explicitly Designed
In addition to the various emergent tactics that form in every game, Dragon's Dogma makes an effort to include deliberate tactical weaknesses for each enemy. Packs of goblins and wolves become less coordinated and threatening when you defeat their leader. Ogres and Elder Ogres primarily target female and male characters for attacks respectively. Evil Eyes drop their impenetrable barriers to remove your status buffs in response to weapon enchantments. Each of these explicitly designed behaviors can be exploited in combat to greater combat these foes on top of the subtler weaknesses that emerge through play.
Weaknesses Connect and Lead to Win Conditions
Where enemy weakness really begin to shine the most is when they interact with one another. My favorite example of this is the hydra, an enormous 4-headed snake based off of the Herculean myth. The Hydra has a clear tactical weakness, in that if all 4 heads of it are cut off at once, it enters a downed state and receives massive bonus damage for a period of time. However, to reach this end goal, you utilize the other types of weaknesses. The best way to sever a hydra's head is of course targeting its physiological weakness (its head) with an elemental weakness (slashing attacks). While you can sever the head of a hydra with any damage type and by attacking any part of its neck, slashing damage is by far the most effective and its much easier to sever the head at the top of the hydra's neck than at the bottom. Now that you've successfully severed one head, you have a limited time to sever the others before the first head regenerates. However, you can prevent the hydra from growing back a severed head for a longer duration by inflicting the Burning status effect, which you do by attacking the stump with a fire attack, tying in yet another elemental weakness. In addition, the hydra uses its heads for most of its attacks, so every head you sever also prevents it attacking with that head, adding another tactical weakness.
Most enemies have a similar spread of weaknesses that interconnect, with a common example being elemental weaknesses that also cause the enemies to be inflicted with the status effect associated with that element. Saurians, for instance, not only take bonus damage from ice attacks, but are easily frozen by them, which allows players to then more easily target their physiological weakness by severing the Saurian's tail. Then, the lack of a tail completely changes the Saurian's behavior as they can no longer balance themselves upright and become much more easily staggered. This is greatly enhanced in large monster fights, when exploiting monster weaknesses results in toppling a monster in a climax further fueled by the theme Imminent Triumph.
What Does This Accomplish?
Dragon's Dogma enemies have interconnected weaknesses that radically alter enemy behavior, but how does it actually improve gameplay? For one, the nature of the various weaknesses play off of the other combat design choices in the game incredibly well, with two particular examples: enemy climbing and party composition.
The first is one of the unique selling points of Dragon's Dogma, being the ability to freely climb onto large monsters and attack them. This allows the game to create interesting and unique physiological weaknesses for enemies, as the player can always climb to reach the various weak points of a monster if they cannot hit them from the ground. This is exemplified by the Golem, where players have to destroy the various magic medallions scattered across its body in order to defeat the monster.
The second is common in many party-based RPGs, but the purpose of that is mainly to have either coverage of roles (tank, healer, buffer, DPS) or to ensure the party can deal with every threat (physical attackers to hit enemies immune to magic and vice versa). Dragon's Dogma adds an additional layer of synergy in that you'll want to construct parties to enact particular team strategies in ways few other RPGs encourage. This is greatly improved upon by the pawn rental and vocation systems allowing you to quickly change your party members to suit your needs when outside of combat. Speaking of the pawn rental system, knowledgeable pawns can actually teach players new tactics and how to exploit particular monster weaknesses, further enhancing the overall gameplay experience.
While these two benefits are primarily gameplay benefits, the excellently designed weakness system also helps further the idea that the enemies the player fights truly are monsters of myth rather than just featureless collections of data. The reactivity element of targeting weaknesses is especially important to making enemies feel alive while some of the less direct weaknesses create an interesting mini-narrative to fights. Then, when these elements lead to a monster becoming downed, an overall narrative for each fight is formed, with the rising action being the targeting of each weakness and the climax happening when Imminent Triumph plays.
Application in Other Games
While crafting a deep and complex weakness system is definitely time-consuming, a designer can still apply many of the lessons learned from Dragon's Dogma to games using existing systems. Take a game such as Dungeons & Dragons 5e, for instance. As it currently stands, a Werewolf is immune to non-magical physical attacks except from silver weapons. This is an incredibly uninteresting design. The strategy this invokes is just "have silver or magical weapons" and inspires neither decision-making on the player's behalf nor creates an engaging narrative. A more interesting alternative would be that silver weapons force a werewolf into its original form, making it both easier to fight or lead to a more nuanced social encounter. This not only encourages players to use the specific weakness of a werewolf (silver) rather than the more generic magical weapons, but can allow for entire narratives being built around discovering this weakness, acquiring the silver weapons, and then confronting the werewolf.
The important elements of making engaging weaknesses are to not only have the weaknesses make logical/narrative sense, but to also have a unique and interesting payoff that can't just be achieved through other means. While Pathfinder 2e has more interesting enemy weaknesses than Dungeons & Dragons 5e, it doesn't always deliver on the latter. A good instance of this are the various unique weaknesses of Demons. In Pathfinder 2e, each Demon represents a specific sin and has a weakness tied to that sin. A succubus, a demon born from lust, has a unique weakness in having its advances spurned. While this definitely adds flavor to the monster, the only effect of triggering this weakness is only damage. While this is in part due to the design philosophy of Pathfinder 2e necessitating tight combat math, a more interesting alternative that could better alter enemy behavior such as inflicting the Sickened or Confused status effects or preventing the Succubus from using some of its abilities would have better served the creature as a narrative piece.
Concluding Thoughts
One of the best ways to make creatures in games more interesting and immersive is to have them change their behavior in response to stimuli. Weaknesses changing enemy behavior is just one aspect of this, but it's a particularly potent tool as it encourages players to experiment with new strategies, more greatly empowers them when they target weaknesses, and provides an excellent texture to your creatures. No one will remember the time they did an extra 30 damage to the ice elemental by throwing a fireball at it, but they will certainly remember the time a fireball melted the ice elemental's frozen armor to reveal its pulsating heart beneath.
Next time, I'll be covering how the concept of Hit Points can be innovated upon, as well as reasons why many games haven't.
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