Player sets new Dragon’s Dogma 2 speedrun record with no clothes

The Arisen is unclothed – not the player. Well, we guess anyway.
Capcom

There’s a new Dragon’s Dogma 2 speedrun record, and as far as we can tell, it’s the RPG’s first run with no weapons and no clothes. YouTuber Infected Durian posted the run, which takes just under two hours, clocking in at 1:48:50 (thanks, GamesRadar). 

That might seem like a pretty long time if you look at the small handful of other Dragon’s Dogma 2 speedrun times. The fastest New Game Plus run takes just 50 minutes, and the current record for a regular game is set at 1:19: 32. It’s still an impressive feat, though, considering Durian doesn’t use some of the other, established tricks for shaving time off a run, including the Thief’s speedy skills. That plus the fact that his Arisen is running around in his underwear and punching dragons with his bare hands.

The thing that makes such feats of derring-do possible is New Game Plus, combined with a quirk in Dragon’s Dogma 2’s design that means enemies don’t scale with you. A level 500 Arisen – yes, it’s possible – could start at the beginning and face a troupe of goblins the same strength as they are when you play the game for the first time.

That still leaves room for unexpected surprises, though. Even a beefed-up Arisen dies when a griffin busts their wooden lift when said lift is 10 meters in the air. And there’s plenty of room for improvement and new strategies as well. Speedrun.com has just nine runs registered on the Dragon’s Dogma 2 leaderboards as of this piece’s publication. That’s pretty low, though to be fair, Dragon’s Dogma 2 and its lack of fast travel do a very good job of tricking you into thinking its main campaign is bigger and more complex than they really are.


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Josh Broadwell

JOSH BROADWELL

Joshua Broadwell is a freelance writer with bylines for GameSpot, NPR, Polygon, and more.