Having played it's predecessor before the sequel I could not help feeling like there were opportunities missed in this entry just like in the first. It feels very different from the original. But they share a lot of the same design philosophies. Where the game really shines over the original it's the graphical fidelity and overall world as well as some QoL improvements. The camp mechanic really lends itself to the cross country adventure. It's a real shame that they removed the layered armor system from before as there was depth stripped from the original.

Dragon’s Dogma 2:

Spoilers for both the first game and this one in regards to the dragon ONLY. No other story beats.
BE WARNED

I recently played Dragon’s Dogma 1 in preparation for the sequel. It was always a game that I would hear people talk about and it always seemed right up my RPG loving alley. Finally after years of having it in the backlog, I played an experience like no other. What the first game could do in the year it was released is nothing short of spectacular. My anticipation for the sequel was lit aflame and now I can talk about if it all lived up to that burning.

The sequel reflects the first games cycle of endless Arisen, the character made by the dragon to fight it in an eternal battle. Sometimes the playable character, other times certain NPC’s around you. Taking what the first game built up, the sequel sticks to the roadmap that was given to us all previously. You are the Arisen, your heart has been taken by a dragon and you must defeat it in order to keep the cycle continuous unless you mayhap find, another way.

The story for its most part, is just a copy and paste of the first. This to me, is either seen as a genius way to say “The cycle never ends” or it is a lazy attempt to fill in a games world with the same story beats so they could earnestly “remake” the original. I almost felt like I was playing the same game at points in how the game tracks as a plot line. However, there is something missing from this that the first game nailed and with a discussion with a friend, I realised what this was. The dragon.
In the first Dragon’s Dogma, Grigori was a constant reminder to you, the playable character. He would taunt you, show up throughout the story and speak whispers in your mind. He would play with you and that made him a much more interesting threat. It also helped his voice actor David Lodge gave Grigori one of the best dragon performances ever.
In this sequel however, the dragon is so much of an afterthought that it feels just…kind of there. It doesn’t do anything. I honestly forgot the dragon was meant to be why I was in this predicament in the first place.

Unrelated to the dragon, there is a moment near the end of the game that makes you give a character a certain object that makes no sense whatsoever and they do not explain to you why on earth you’d ever give this character that object with everything the game makes you believe about them.
The story is a mess and is the greatest weakness to an otherwise fantastic game, which I will go into now because this review is sounding too negative!

The overall gameplay of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is so fantastic and fun. I almost never used the fast travel or carts that could dart you between towns. I loved running around with my main pawn, my friends and (insert random pawn from the rift here) as we ran across the landscape of each location. It was a blast to try out all the different vocations and see which class really stuck with me. Each one was so unique in the way it handled combat and traversal. Shout out to Mystic Spearhand for making me do sick flips and gauging out Cyclops eyes faster than I could breathe.

The combat in this game feels really good and there are a lot of extremely enjoyable in game moments that happen with the different kind of “mini boss” varieties. One enemy will jump onto a wall and if you have clinged onto them, you will go with them and can knock them down to the floor to wail on them with all your might. Drakes will smash through the ground they’re on and you can go down with them on crumbling stone.

There are a lot of fantastic gameplay elements that give a great sense of adventure in the main open world locations you will explore. I must note that the only issue I did have running around was that the enemy variety is quite limited. Despite a lot of terrain switches in the large locations, you will ultimately see the same enemies repeated without much of a difference. It is a shame that there couldn’t be more added in but it personally didn’t bother me TOO much, however it is worth noting.

Two other big issues that folks had I would like to bring up was Dragonplauge. I had a hilarious time with this in game disease because despite pawns being infected with it, before the patch that made it less likely, I never saw it. I wasn’t careful with inn sleeps either. The hidden disease that would make pawns kill an entire town while you slept sounded so awesome and people hated it online. I never saw it and thus, cannot form an opinion on it at all despite that, this is such an awesome idea that would have been so cool to talk about at school with friends and they wouldn’t believe you that it was real. I love the concept personally.

The second issue was Capcom slapping the publisher “WE MUST MAKE MONEY” hammer and dropping microtransactions at launch for a single player game. I must make this clear, this is a publisher issue and Capcom do this with ALL their games. It is not a practice I think should exist and honestly, I hate that it is here at all.
However, you don’t need them. Not a single microtransaction in this game is needed and can be easily avoided. It isn’t hard to get anything you could buy with real life money. It is a shitty business practice and should nave have seen this game but I will not knock it down because of it. Itsuno would never have wanted these here and it shows, because it really is easy to live without them.

I had an absolutely fantastic time with Dragon’s Dogma 2 overall. Maybe it was due to having my friends pawn along with me. Maybe it was because I loved the first game so much, I just needed more of it.
It has MAJOR flaws overall but I had a great time going for the platinum and hope that we do see some DLC or even just big updates to expand what they have here. It may not be as good as the first but my golly, the gameplay is just so much fun. I can’t help but love it.

On one hand I'm mad that it has less content that the first game, that some classes have disappeared, that others are less fun...

But on the other, god it's so much fun. I'm on my 4th run and I just can't stop replaying it over and over. Becoming stronger and stronger and absolutely destroying big monsters that were big threats the first time I met them.

This game gives the exact same feeling that the first game gave when it released, and for that reason alone, Dragon's Dogma 2 is a big success.

DD 2's approach to world design, its loving disinterest in commonly accepted quality of life features, its sometimes obscure but always interesting mechanics - all of that I hope will inspire games to come.
Unfortunately DD2 runs out of gas really quickly. There simply are not enough enemy types and environment types to sustain the game's length. I can only fight goblins and ogres on my way to a cave with nothing interesting in it so many times. Pair that with forgetable writing and a bland story, and despite loving my first 10 or so ours with it I quickly soured on DD and ultimately dropped it.

Give the team that animated the Sphinx a massive raise though, holy shit.

I wasn't sure, after my first few hours of play, how much I'd like this. I had high hopes that it would capitalize on some of the unfulfilled potential of the first game, and my first impression was that it didn't quite. The first big monster encounter didn't really add anything to what the original was doing, and there's no trace of the cool rhythm-oriented attack sequencing that intrigued me so much.

But I kept at it, I switched from Fighter to Thief, and I came around. The exploration is very cool, capturing a sense of place and reward-for-exploration with the best of the open world games. And the more I played the big monster fights, the more I thought they were pretty compelling.

The rest of it is... mixed. I have a tremendous amount of affection and respect for the way it chooses to use friction in its palette: the limits on fast travel work fantastically, with my only complaint being that staying awake on an oxcart should be more feasible and not a totally endless parade of encounters that end up destroying the cart; the class system hits a good balance of rewarding multiclassing without making it free; the quests are mostly a pleasing level of kinda janky.

But boy, is this game huge. Even resisting the urge to explore comprehensively or track down every last side quest, I'm twenty-five hours in and feeling like I've barely scratched the surface. And while I'm not intrinsically opposed to a game of that size, I don't think the moment-to-moment combat or writing quite has the legs to hold up a game of that size. Not for me, not when I have so many other games I want to get around to.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 offers everything the first game offered: A beautiful open world to explore that has secrets and loot after every corner. Massive enemies to conquer with a battle system somewhere between Monster Hunter and Devil May Cry that is just super fun to engage with. A clever pawn system where you travel with up to three NPCs, one of your own creation and two from other players that can be hired and dismissed at will. Tons of weapons, armour and skills to play around with. No hand holding and a significant lack of modern quality of life features which makes the “adventure” part of the game shine even more. Because you actually have to plan your travels and can get into bad situations if you are not careful enough or badly equipped. And still, even when this game nails all these points and is very true to the original I left a tiny bit disappointed. Because while being very true to the original it doesn’t feel like a fully fledged sequel but more like a reimagination of the first game. It doesn’t help that almost every enemy type is known from the first game as well. And they didn’t even use all the old enemies and only added a few new ones. I also liked the more focused nature of the endgame of the original more. And there is nothing in Dragon’s Dragon 2 like Bitterblack Isle - the DLC Mega-Dungeon of the first game. Still, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an amazing game that runs circles around most modern open-world RPGs and an absolute must-play for every RPG- and fantasy fan.

Um jogo roubou meu coração.

Dragon's Dogma 2 me proporcionou uma das melhores experiências que tive com videogame, é incrível.

A história principal cumpre um papel, nem de longe o foco dele é esse, mas ela não deixa de apresentar personagens legais e ter momentos épicos.

A exploração do jogo foi a parte que me encantou, eu nunca fiquei tão empolgado em explorar um jogo igual aqui. É incrível ver algo interessante no horizonte, ir fuçar cada cantinho para abrir um baú e às vezes não receber nada de interessante. Porém a jornada até lá aconteceu coisas aleatórias que fizeram valer a pena.

O combate é fenomenal, todas as classes que maximizei (só skipei as duas de magia e mestre de guerra) foram ótimas, sempre tendo que se adaptar nas lutas, assim dando um gostinho de coisa nova sempre.

Os monstros por mais que a variedade não seja muita, são ótimas lutas devido a como se comportam e as ocasiões. Foi ótimo assistir uma luta entre um dragão e um ciclope, muito sufocante lutar contra dois golens de pedra ao mesmo tempo e engraçado ver ciclopes caírem na porrada entre si, entrar na briga e matar os dois.


Dragon's Dogma 2 é um jogo que acerta muito por ser corajoso. Corajoso por dar ao jogador toda essa liberdade, ao te fazer dar voltas no mapa a pé, pois vai demorar 30 horas para você achar um portcrystal, em causar frustração após falhar em missões e ao espalhar uma praga que vai dizimar toda a cidade. Foi incrível viver apenas isso por quase um mês. EU QUERO MAIS EU QUERO O DLC.


Os pontos negativos ficam com o desempenho nas cidades, é horrível, a variedade de monstros e ao menu de itens que poderiam ter caprichado um pouquinho mais. Coisas minúsculas para o quão magnífico é esse jogo.

Hay juegos que no tienen una definición clara cuando te preguntan que te parece o si lo recomiendas. Y, es una sensación rara la verdad el no saber que decir y es lo que me pasa con Dragon´s Dogma 2.
Pero no porque no me haya gustado sino porque es un viaje extraño, un viaje imperfecto que te cansas de tanta masilla o no sentirte a veces con el nivel concorde que dice el juego. Pero si me dejasen 2 segundos antes de responder, puede que me temblase la voz en cuanto al juego en si porque me vendría al recuerdo una de las primeras veces que me subí a un carromato para ir a un sitio y pararme a pegarme con enemigos y de repente oir el grito de un grifo y saber que era entre él o yo, moverme y esquivar, intentar subirme. Obviamente ese primer duelo ganó él. Pero, cada uno que veía era enfrentarme porque recordaba esa primera sensación de GUAU que experiencia más guay estoy viviendo, o esa noche que el corazón late con fuerza y aparece un dragón, el pasar por una puerta, el ver el paisaje y sus lejanías, los peones acompañándome en este viaje... Hay muchos recuerdos bonitos en este viaje. En este viaje que en parte he creado con mis momentos GUAU e Itsuno queriéndose alejar de algunos estereotipos de mundo abierto y haciendo que TÚ viaje TÚ dogma y ciclo, sean únicos.
Vivimos en un mundo que todo tiene que ser perfectamente milimétrico y a Itsuno le da igual, sabe que es una joya sin pulir pero es su joya. Y, si voy a una joyería, que me den esta joya y no otra.
Porque a veces tenemos que cumplir cánones que no deberíamos y la lista de tics de la industria. Es el AAA más atrevido (por ahora) de este año, el que me ha hecho sonreír de que iba a ser entre X bicho o yo, flipar cada momento GUAU y en el que hay una parte que no se puede hablar. Pero que parte y que huevos a atreverse a hacer esto.
Por más juegos así, por mas viajes tan bonitos como Dragon´s Dogma 2.

this game ended up being a lot less in-depth than I imagined. I felt a majority of the quests didnt require much thought just walk & talk. Travel became so tedious after the 8th trip down the same road with the same dudes on it thank god combat saved this game hard. I made the mistake of starting magey boy but after switching some real fun began. It was easy to ignore how shallow the RPG elements were while murdering fools, I just wish the boss enemies had bigger balls to grab onto and punch. Anyway this game scratched my hack and slash monsters itch very well and not much else, true ending title reveal was hella cool but after the ENTIRE GAME cmon bruh. my ass doesn't want start ng+ just to walk across the world again 30 times I got brain blisters from that. Gonna let some dust settle before this little adventure again. FINAL THOUGHT, Man every motherfucker in the galaxy wanna go on a jaunt but don't wanna put out afterwords .. Like What are we even doing here This game is NOT HORNY ENOUGH

Pre warning: I have not finished this game yet.

Ok I am finally back on the backlog train after being completely derailed by balatro. This was the game I was playing concurrently with it. This is an overall fairly enjoyable game that I would only recommend to people who are willing to work hard for the fun they can get out of a game.

This is probably the most important thing I can say in this review, dragon’s dogma 2 makes you work to extract the enjoyment out of it. It is the product of a creative sticking to their vision even though it goes against many of the tropes and ideas that modern games are built upon. For instance, you have almost certainly heard this by now but this is an open world game with no easy to access fast travel mechanics. The game does have fast travel via ferrystones and Oxcarts, but these both have stipulations that mean you won’t always have access to them. Hence walking to and from places to finish quests will be a large part of your experience in this game. I don’t completely hate this, it means you have to be very thoughtful with the order in which you do things and have to think logistically about resources and where/when to use them. Difficulty and obstacles are always a challenge for developers to balance. Too much difficulty and the player gives up but too little and the player will not respect the game or beat it too easy and move on.

Dragon’s dogma instead opts to those multiple wrenches at your gameplay experience that force you to pay close attention to what is going on around you. For instance much ado has been made over the dragon’s plague mechanic where your pawn’s can become sick and if you go to sleep when they are sick, well they can destroy a whole village worth of NPCs effectively hard locking you out of quest progression and ending your time with the game. Personally I love this, even though you are playing a game I appreciate a game not completely validating you, life won’t completely validate you. Even though you might be playing for some escapism, I personally prefer the emotional experience of being humbled by a game. Dragon’s dogma is filled with an uncanny indifference towards the player. It’s filled with much uncanny awkwardness in general. When I played the original dd, I thought to myself there is no way this was intended to be this awkward and weird of a game. I was completely wrong, dd2 shows that the vision was completely intentional. Pawns are in someways like robotic children, they say words but with no feeling around them, they incessantly babble, but they are always helpful. Then there is the FMV meat cooking videos. The fact that you can pick up and carry NPCs to certain locations to retrigger their quests. This is a very video gamey video game. Something the medium has lost touch with in many ways.

So yeah dragon’s dogma 2 isn’t for everyone. I myself will have to come back to it someday.

Really happy that I ended up enjoying this game much more than I expected. I played like 6 hours of the first game and was not into it at all, so spending $70 on this game was a pretty big risk for me, but for whatever reason, I was quickly invested into DD2 and stayed engaged throughout my entire playthrough. Very different from your traditional open-world game, and I'm glad that Capcom wasn't afraid to take the risk of keeping out some pretty common modern-day QoL features of a typical game like this, and kept true to it's philosophy for the franchise of a more punishing and slower-paced experience, and ultimately I think they were quite succesful.

The world itself is nothing too interesting, with only really 2-3 different areas aesthetically, but it is still quite beautiful and while there are certainly games with better exploration, I did not find myself getting bored in the open-world, except maybe once or twice having to run somewhere near the end of the main story when I ran out of Riftstones. There are some interesting landmarks and worthwhile secrets here and there, quite a bit that I'm sure I missed as well, and overall the experience of going from one destination to another is pretty enjoyable.

I'm making no bold statement by saying combat is the highlight of DD2, but it really is great. The closest comparison I felt throughout was of Monster Hunter, rewarding a mastery of your vocations, patience, and occasional and extremely satisfying opportunities for big damage or awesome plays. The difficulty throughout the game felt pretty fair, with a good sense of exhilarating power fantasy by the end as you rip through boss health bars, and some pretty cool endgame fights as well. I played two different classes mainly: Warrior and Mystic Spearhand. Both of these were quite fun and had a lot to master; Warrior was definitely my favorite, but they both felt great once fully upgraded, with lots of tools. Enemy variety wasn't the best, there's only maybe six or seven different types of bosses (not including the endgame content), although discovering a new one here and there was super exciting. You also end up fighting variants of the same like three or four smaller enemies, which was a little disappointing, but not fully unacceptable.

While the overarching plot of the game is pretty whatever, I actually found a lot of the subplots and side characters quite interesting and well-written. I wasn't blown away by anything in the story but the characters and certain side-quests do make the world feel alive, which was an issue I had with the first game. As I'd expect most players would, I did end up growing pretty attached to my own pawn by the end, and was very happy to have him with me throughout my journey.

I think I could recommend this game to most people, even though it is not your traditional modern-day action RPG, which I think might actually be a selling point to some. The generally reasonable difficulty level also I don't think would bar too many people who might be intimidated by the game's unique approach to open world.

Generously ~8.5/10

Dragon's Dogma 2 is a very hard game for me to rate because there is genuinely a lot that is not good with it. With that being said, this is one of my favorite action RPGs in terms of the fun factor and combat and exploration carry basically all of the weight in that aspect.

Combat is fluid, weighty, environmentally interactive, and diverse. Enemy variety can dry up due to the density of encounters and it is very easy to overpower via levels but the unique feel of each vocation and ability variety make it an absolute blast to fight in most encounters.

Exploration isn't super rewarding in terms of loot but the way combat plays out can feel very organic in a way I never experienced in other games. Going out into the wilderness with your pawns genuinely inspired a feeling of going on an adventure and the tension, the intrigue, and the challenge all pooled together for a great experience.

With my former experience with Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen, it was good that this was all I expected and wanted out of the series as it satisfied what I wanted out of the game. However, that's where most of my positives dry up.

The story is even less cohesive than the original title with a kind of cool overall theme that is accompanied by characters that feel unimportant and uninspired, poorly paced story quests, and a general lack of urgency or importance.

The graphics are pretty solid and the world carried a gritty, realism inspired fantasy look but it has an overall lack of diversity and interesting art direction. A lot of the world lacks the magnificence and wonder expected of the fantasy experience, instead replacing it with a plethora of scenic vistas that don't really tell a story.

For fans of the first entry in the series, Dragon's Dogma 2 feels a lot like a greater volume version of the original with none of the hoped for improvements. If you go in looking to fight a bunch of monsters in a fun and badass way, this game can be incredible, as it was for me. If you want more out of this game or something resembling a halfway decent experience as an RPG, it will probably be best to look elsewhere.

Play this game for the world, not the story. It demands a lot of you, but gives a lot back. It's incredibly rewarding, being forced to travel from point A to point B with no fast-travel whatsoever, only to be distracted by a rock sliding blocking your path, that you can shoot down with a catapult not too far away; two giant monsters fighting on the distance while you just happened to stumble upon a balista that's aiming in their direction; or the griffin you fought a while ago that fleed, terrorizing a nearby settlement, that you can recognize because his health bar didn't recover.
The world of Dragon's Dogma 2, and how it interacts with you is filled with charisma. Its story and characters, not so much.

I finally beat Dragon's Dogma 2 and I'll start off here by saying that the drama that came with this game at launch was all bullshit and none of it mattered. It has already been forgotten. Except PC performance which I totally understand.

I'll try to be honest with myself because while I do really think DD2 is a great game, it has some glaring flaws that I couldn't ignore by the time my 80+ hours were over.

First, the combat. I seriously love it. I thought all the classes were fun in different ways and I love how messy and chaotic it can be. It's so much more weighty and "realistic" than your average action RPG. I can't explain how incredible it feels to first fight a griffin, have it soar into the sky with you on it, and bring it crashing to the ground for a kill.

However, the game is pretty lacking in enemy variety I would say. While I was still having fun fighting later in the game, the fifth dragon or the twentieth ogre did get pretty old.

The game still does the limited fast travel, which by end game opens up much more. But you still spend a lot of the time being restricted from which cities you can teleport to and from. I think this leads to an interesting dilemma for the game and it's this:

Wandering around and exploring is literally 10/10

Trying to get to a certain place to finish quests or side missions is 0/10

And this all feeds together because by about half way through the game I couldn't have cared less about the story or really any of the characters in the game. This meant that when I did try to buckle down and make some progress, I was just trying to get it over with so I could go back to exploring on my own. Then on your way to do some boring side quest, the tenth cyclops you've fought shows up and it's just like... ugh. So no matter how fun the combat is, it will get tedious when you're sent off to fight another griffin so that some idiot can sketch it or whatever. Like, who cares.

I'm just rambling now sorry, but overall I do think DD2 is great. It's just a game that shines best at the beginning. The first 40 hours were absolutely incredible. But not everyone is going to have the patience to stick it through to the end.

Dragon's Dogma II is beautifully idiosyncratic, if not lacking somewhat in enemy/location variety, but makes up for that in it's open-ended approach to design. Changing your class whenever you like adds so much to this game that is lacking in most other fantasy RPGs. Grounding the way you traverse its world makes you put thought into how you navigate it. Creating your own skillset allows you to build weird and wonderful characters, a very fun way to experiment with how you will approach combat. The way it doesn't hold your hand, making you pay attention to the inhabitants of the world or even becoming obtuse and confounding separate this from your typical game. Overall it's almost like they turned Monster Hunter into an open world RPG, it's really something. I never played the first, something I'll likely rectify, but I really enjoyed my time with this and will probably return for a quicker second run.

I wrote out a short review a couple days ago because I'd believed I had finished the game when I sat on the thrown, becoming the Sovran. I was mistaken, Dragon's Dogma II had just begun. A gorgeously textured "epic" fantasy that became a deconstruction of the hero's journey. The submission of your pawn and the other pawns you encounter is turned into a mirror where you are faced with your own lack of will in the grand scheme of this world. That this was all designed exactly for the Arisen's journey. You don't take on quests, they are mandated by the game's creators just as the Arisen's path is to carry these quests out in a facsimile of will. A game greater than the sum of its parts, and there are some very strong parts.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is an example of a game that has received far too little love from the creators. At the same time, this game could have become a cult classic, because the idea and presentation of the game world is really good. However, the fact that so many elements were not finished or badly designed at the stage of preliminary assumptions shows how poorly the creators know today's gaming realities and the needs of players. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a game that I finished and platinumed with pleasure, even though there were many problems, because there is really something to explore, but I will never play it again. It's just not a very nice thing to do when a game costs PLN 300 and even if you don't look at the microtransactions (which, by the way, I never felt I had to buy anything during the game), it's just blatantly obvious how little the creators were involved in the production of the game. And it's not even that it lacks polish and can be fixed with a patch, the problems are often design-related, deep in the game's code and can't be fixed. In the age of such productions as Baldur's Gate 3, or the previously mentioned Skyrim and Mass Effect, releasing a game like Dragon’s Dogma 2 by a major studio for that price is simply a shame. All that remains for Dragon’s Dogma 2 is to kiss the feet of good RPGs, because it will never stand shoulder to shoulder with them.

Full Review:
https://bigbaddice.pl/dragons-dogma-2-recenzja/

Ran into 2 really annoying bugs, way too many enemies on the road, battles were constant or 2 random large enemies would come out of nowhere and I would get destroyed. Some of the vocations were really fun, some not so much.

When you are being overrun with enemies, the staggering is nuts, you can't get up and they just wail on you constantly. I didn't have many issues with the frame rate, generally decent. Combat was a little janky, also depends on your vocation.

The world is massive and gets even larger during the end game. Overall, I did enjoy my time with it even though I got a frustrated a few times. A solid 8/10.

One of the few games that archived to give me the feeling of adventures/exploring a new world. The last games that could archive that would be Totk and Elden Ring. Yet still it's missing something, the something little thing that would make this game to a 10/10.

First of all the exploration is great, it's the main part and best part of the game besides the combat. Unfortunately, the magic of exploration kind of lost its magic when you realize that the bosses are always at the same spot. So all the enemies are always at the same spot and oh boy this game really has no enemy variety.
All these points weren't a problem for the most part of the game because of the fantastic combat, all the vocations play almost completely differently, and it's great how you can just switch them at any time.
Unfortunately, I was a little bit annoyed at the end of the game because I just wanted to explore, but couldn't go 5 meters in this game without being attacked by the same two enemies and can't go 50 meters without encountering the same golem or griffin. This only was a problem for the last few hours at the desert region, but then suddenly I saw myself fighting the end boss, since the ending of this game is at least for me very sudden.
At this point, Dragons Dogma completely changed and surprised me. I have heard that the ending of the first one is crazy but as I played the first one in preparation for DD2 a few weeks ago I didn't make it to the end......


Spoiler for ending/endgame:

The ending is wild, a whole new world is locked behind a secret ending and the game literally switches to hardcore mode.
I can imagine many people dislike this, but I love it, aside from that lots of people won't even get there.