Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a game where I want to take so many pictures. Every fight you get into is different, whether you’re facing up against new creatures or suddenly having a griffin fly in from on high as you’re stabbing the heck out of an armored cyclops. The game world is built to accommodate such encounters, so naturally, you’d want to capture the memorable battles that stick in your memory as iconic moments you’ll likely never witness again.

Sadly, the tools provided for you in the photo mode just don’t stretch far enough to make this possible, with Dragon’s Dogma 2 committing many of the same sins that hinder modes like this across the entire medium. No matter how you move the virtual camera around or which settings you decide to change, the photo mode always orbits around the player, making the depiction of certain angles and characters almost impossible. Why limit it like this?

Dragon’s Dogma 2 also doesn’t come with poses, decals, or the ability to make your character and others disappear in order to accommodate environmental shots. It just isn’t worth the fuss most of the time.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve still taken some absolute bangers despite these restrictions, and my colleagues have too, with Lead Video Editor Sam Hallahan taking some truly stunning shots that have most of us fuming with jealousy. It is more than possible to make Dragon’s Dogma 2 and its photo mode shine with the right amount of experience and patience, but I wish it wasn’t so temperamental in the first place.

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has the same problem, which is practically criminal, given how lovely that game looks and how obsessed I am with its characters. I want to make them pose while looking amazing in a variety of different locations, but the photo mode apparently doesn’t like giving us that kind of freedom. Because, once again, the entire thing orbits around the main character and therefore makes moving the camera around and nailing the right shots almost impossible.

Your best bet is to apply the rule of thirds to your composition and roll with it, and you’ll need to try and crop out characters and objects in the frame that don’t belong, or they just end up looking terrible. Jumping through all these hoops prevents me from engaging in a part of the game I should otherwise adore. But without refinements, I don’t want to bother.

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Rebirth is doubly weird because it bakes use of the photo mode into one of its side quests in which you travel to specific points on the map to take pictures and raise your own rank within a society built around photography. You get cool themes, filters, decals, and other things for your trouble, but since the photo mode is lacking in the first place, I never used them.

If the photo mode was up to scratch and there were notable rewards for taking snaps of new monsters or locations, I would not only jump at the opportunity, I’d also have a variety of pics to look back on that I put my whole heart into, because the tools accommodate me. But right now they don’t, and I’m stuck wishing Dragon’s Dogma 2 and Rebirth had better feature sets like the ones seen in Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Forbidden West, or The Last of Us Part 2. Those photo modes offer more options and fewer limitations, even if it means giving players power to break their own immersion.

Stop orbiting the camera around the player character, let me make specific poses or toggle the presence of certain NPCs, so I can take the perfect snaps. Dragon’s Dogma 2 will fail to reach its full virtual photography without these changes, and I don’t think I’m asking much.

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Dragon's Dogma 2

Action RPG Systems 4.5/5 OpenCritic Reviews Top Critic Avg: 87/100 Critics Rec: 91% Released March 22, 2024 ESRB Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Language, Sexual Themes, Violence Developer(s) Capcom Publisher(s) Capcom Engine RE Engine
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