Has your Dragon’s Dogma 2 Pawn been suffering from headaches lately? Do they seem more confused than usual? Not following orders? Saying things that don’t make sense? What about going on murderous rampages and killing off entire cities’ worth of NPCs?
If so, your Pawn might have an actual in-game disease known as Dragonsplague, and the only way to get rid of it might be to either dismiss them, or in worst-case scenarios, drown them.
Warning: I’m going to spoil a newly-discovered in-game mechanic for Dragon’s Dogma 2 in this article. We won’t be covering any story spoilers, but if you enjoy going in knowing nothing, it’s probably best to skip this one.
In Dragon’s Dogma 2, you are the Arisen, a powerful individual with a specific destiny that involves, among other things, invoking total loyalty and obedience from a group of individuals known as Pawns. Pawns are a strange group of people with the ability to travel between different dimensions (aka, different players’ games) via something known as the Rift, and they obey the Arisen in each world unquestioningly. As a result, a typical playthrough of Dragon’s Dogma 2 involves you forming an adventuring party by creating one Pawn that will be yours through the whole game, and hiring other Pawns to your party that were made by other players and sent out into the Rift.
However, Dragon’s Dogma 2 players have come across something weird about certain Pawns. Pawns seem to be able to contract and spread a disease called Dragonsplague. In its early stages, players are reporting that their Pawns will sometimes speak incoherently, disobey orders, and have strangely glowing red eyes. There’s no way to tell if a Pawn has Dragonsplague while in the Rift before hiring them, but once they are hired, the signs start to become apparent. If left unchecked, then eventually resting at an inn will trigger a cutscene where the Pawn in question transforms into a shadowy dragon and nukes an entire city, which can include killing off quest-critical NPCs. Yes, even NPCs necessary for the main story quest.
Fortunately, Dragonsplague is pretty simple to deal with once you know the signs. Players are speculating Dragonsplague is gotten from battles with dragons, and Pawns can also pass it to one another, so if you hire one Pawn with the plague, they might spread it to others in the party. It’s worth noting that the tutorial box for Dragonsplague will pop up the first time you have a Pawn that has contracted it, so seeing that dialogue appear is almost certainly a sign you need to get rid of that Pawn immediately. And the disease does take several in-game days to progress, and only triggers the devastating shadow dragon cutscene at inns, so if you’re not sure if your party has it, you can just avoid inns until you’re confident your party is clean.
So what do you do to cure Dragonsplague? If you hire someone else’s Pawn that has the disease, simply dismiss them immediately – no problem. But it can be trickier if your own Pawn gets it, as you can’t just dismiss them, and if they die and you revive them, it’s still there. The only cure is, weirdly, to drown your main Pawn by pushing them into a body of water. When you visit a Riftstone to re-summon them, they’ll be completely cured. Just think of it like…washing their hands. Thoroughly.
Some players have been sharing their frustrations after Dragonsplague nuked entire towns in their games, seemingly cutting them off from critical story paths. But other players may have found solutions. One possibility is to use Wakestones to revive townspeople. While Wakestones are rare, there’s a simple Pawn quest that rewards a Wakestone that many low-level Pawns will have. All you have to do is hire a Pawn with the quest, sit on a bench for a full day and night, then dismiss them to get the reward. Blammo, infinite Wakestones. Another, easier option seems to be to sit on a bench for several in-game weeks, after which point NPCs will start to respawn on their own. It’s not fully confirmed that this second method works, but players are reporting promising signs.
So watch out for red eyes and weird behavior, drown or get rid of Pawns that exhibit it, and you’re golden. Then again, maybe you’ve always wanted to visit yet another dragon attack on the poor village of Melve! Who am I to stop you?
We’re still working out all the details of how Dragonsplague works, but for everything else, IGN has got you covered with a massive Wiki guide to help you navigate all the trickiest challenges of Dragon’s Dogma 2. You can find it all right here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
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