It's a Dragonsplague vaccine, if you will.
First reported by Eurogamer, a couple of modders on the Nexus have already started finding ways to curtail the Dragonsplague in Dragon’s Dogma 2, with remedies ranging from clearer signs of the disease to out and out removing it from the game.
For the uninitiated, the Dragonsplague spreads through Dragon’s Dogma 2’s pawns, the little henchmen you can create, pick up, or trade via asynchronous multiplayer. Sometimes you’ll notice a pawn has a headache and glowing red eyes—from there it’s just a hop skip and a jump to them turning into a dragon and murdering NPC quest givers. One infected pawn can spread it among your crew, who can then take it to other players’ worlds through the online sharing system.
It’s a genuinely scary, innovative simulation of a disease’s spread, complete with a sense of dread and incomplete knowledge as to who’s infected or not. Dealing with Dragonsplague requires purging your pawns with extreme prejudice, kicking them out of your party, killing your main pawn—it reminds me of the quarantine platform bit from MGSV. Some players have even tried devising ways of signaling that their pawns are infected.
But let’s say you’re not into all that. On the lighter touch end of the mod spectrum, rthomasv3 over on NexusMods created a counter system that shows up on pawns’ foreheads to more clearly communicate if they have Dragonsplague and how close they are to slaughtering a town. Meanwhile, the questionably-named MrBoobieBuyer has a Dragonsplague cure mod that communicates the disease’s status through the in game UI, while also providing a hotkey to instantly cure your pawns. The imitable MrBoobieBuyer also has an “immersive” version that makes the cure an in-game consumable.
Don’t want to mess around with Dragonsplague at all? Well rthomasv3 also has a mod that just completely excises the system from the game—no muss, no fuss.
I gotta say that I’m still team Dragonsplague: high-friction, surprising systems like this feel special in an age of live service transparency and perfect esports balance—see also how cheats and datamining can take the magic out of Helldivers 2. All the same, the fact that these modders managed to crank out solutions so quickly is damned impressive, and who am I to tell you that you are required to enjoy a deadly epidemic simulation in your free time?
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