Dragon’s Dogma Has One of Gaming’s Best Dungeons – And Not Enough People Have Played It

With most fantasy RPG enjoyers now counting the days until Dragon’s Dogma 2 finally releases and its PC sales skyrocketing thanks to the pre-launch character creator tool, I recently found myself going through the original title’s endgame again as a warmup of sorts.

Dragon’s Dogma, even in its Dark Arisen release, is famous for whipping ass despite being nowhere nearly finished. I’ve already blabbered about how it nails a sense of camaraderie, which isn’t as common in modern RPGs as we’d like it to be, and that’s kind of the thing with the whole experience: All the great stuff is already there one way or another. It was simply missing the extra time and polish to truly become an all-timer. Hopefully, Dragon’s Dogma 2 will be exactly that.

Dragon’s Dogma’s biggest strengths were the dungeons, caves, and many underground labyrinths. While the overworld map clearly suffered several cutbacks, it made up for much of its limited scale with dark chambers that actually felt (and still feel) properly spooky and menacing.

Chief among them – even above the base game’s Everfall – is Bitterblack Isle, the location where all of the Dark Arisen expansion takes place. Like much of the base game, there’s not much of an actual storyline bar certain beats, but it contains juicy tidbits of information and at least one shocking reveal for anyone who’s been paying attention to what’s actually happening with the Dragon, the Arisen, and the seemingly never-ending cycle of conflict and destruction.

I’m not here to discuss any of that though. Instead, I’d like to highlight how Bitterblack Isle might be modern gaming’s best and most brutal dungeon… that not enough gamers have checked out, which is a big claim after all the punishing games that FromSoftware and other studios replicating their formula have put out in recent years.

Much like other fantastic DLCs we still remember, such as Oblivion’s Shivering Isles expansion, Dark Arisen is completely separated from the main game, packing all it has to offer into Bitterblack Isle instead of all over the main world map. The recommended level requirements are hefty, but the bravest Arisen-led parties can venture into the huge multi-floor dungeon as soon as they want once the main campaign’s first steps are done.

The most skilled veterans have been using its earlier areas to farm quick XP and blast through the first 30 character levels or so, which in turn allows them to speedrun the campaign. Dragon’s Dogma is cool like that. Newcomers and rusty adventurers will have trouble even early on despite meeting the endgame-ish levels though. After all, Bitterblack Isle is meant to be the game’s ultimate challenge.

It’s not necessarily long to fully explore and beat once you know what you’re doing either, but it welcomes being replayed for the best gear in the game, especially after beating the spoilerific final boss once, which resets the whole place as an even harder dungeon that leads to the big bad’s true form. By that point, sludging through the whole thing can feel like Delicious in Dungeon’s main quest in the best possible way. You’ll need to rest using well-calculated “pit stops” of sorts, and the two shortcuts to exit and re-enter the massive dungeon at certain points are the kind of great idea that otherwise remarkable undergrounds like Dragon Age: Origins’ Deep Roads needed to reach true excellence.

Bitterblack Isle isn’t just a remarkable exercise in level design and risk-reward balance for the most seasoned players. It’s also the kind of raid-like content you see in hit MMOs like Destiny 2 (unique mechanics included) applied to a strictly single-player experience. As much as I love Skyrim, and almost every huge RPG that followed in its footsteps, getting truly lost inside the world’s bowels and fighting for every inch of a huge dungeon isn’t something they offered (unless you looked for the right mods).

CRPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 are more used to putting entire parties through brutal gauntlets, yet it’s hard to find something as unique and genuinely tough as nails as Bitterblack Isle in them. Moreover, turn-based encounters running for longer than anything in real time always make adventures feel bigger than they actually are. As much as I loved Larian’s take on the Underdark, it actually didn’t offer anything that different from the rest of the game, as it served an entirely different purpose.

Steam’s global achievements for Dragon’s Dogma show that, at least on PC, less than 10% of the players who own the game have gone through Bitterblack Isle at least once. It’s kind of depressing data given how it’s easily the best content the game has to offer, and a much more polished showcase – despite its vertical slice nature – of what the devs could do when given enough time and money. Dragon’s Dogma 2 looks like everything the original game wanted to be and more, but I’m worried we might have to wait again for late-game thrills as intense as the ones found inside Bitterblack Isle.