In an interview with 4Gamer, Itsuno revealed that the scenes of cook meating in Dragon’s Dogma 2 were real. The team decided against using CGI for these scenes, but not for the reason you might think. [Thanks, 4Gamer!]
This information came up halfway through the interview, when the 4Gamer interviewer commented on how they got hungry just from looking at the meat. Hideaki Itsuno, the director of Dragon’s Dogma 2, revealed that the scenes of the meat cooking over the campfire were real. They’d gathered all the camping enthusiasts on the team and held meetings for months discussing what they liked about camping. One of them mentioned that they could look at meat cooking all day, which the team then implemented into the game.
According to Itsuno, “We could have spent money on CGI for the meat, but we figured that if we were going to spend money anyway, we might as well spent it on real, god meat.” The images change depending on what kind of meat you’re cooking in Dragon’s Dogma 2. Because of the sheer variety in camping types, they could not fit everything that the staff said in the game. All that they kept from the discussions were cooking meat and collecting wood.
While collecting wood has no real meaning from a game point of view, the team considered it something fun about camping. Itsuno said in the 4Gamer interview that he wants the player to say, “Man, the Dragon’s Dogma 2 team is full of idiots,” before he started to laugh. He added that since Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a fantasy world simulator, he wanted to include all of the details that would make it like a life sim of sorts.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 will come out on March 22, 2024 for the PS5, Xbox Series X, and Windows PC. You can check out our preview for the game here.