PAX Prime 2015: Dragon Fin Soup Preview

Back during PAX East 2015, I wrote up a preview of an early build of the upcoming PlayStation 4, PS3, PS Vita, and PC RPG Dragon Fin Soup, which stars an alcoholic Little Red Riding Hood, called “Red Robin,” as its main character. During PAX Prime 2015, I got to see an essentially finished build of it.

Since I already wrote about the gameplay modes, how gameplay mechanics will work, and the main character in my PAX East preview, I won’t really be getting into those things. So, instead, I want to focus on how the crafting system, weapons, and towns is implemented.

Crafting Fool

The crafting system is actually far more advanced than I ever thought it would be. I already knew that players will be able to create a variety of weapons and items from found materials, but the developers took this one step further. Instead of simply being able to take, for example, logs and create a sword out of them, they first need to be crafted into something else, like a board, which can then be crafted into the hilt of a sword, while other pieces will be used to craft the rest of the sword. Not only does this make crafting in Dragon Fin Soup complex, but it also makes it harder, since crafting can sometimes fail (especially if you are low level), resulting in no new product and the destruction of the old product.

I learned from the developers that players can either attempt to create an item by throwing random ingredients together, which might result in a loss of a lot of materials, or they can try to collect blueprints and use those to make items.

To gather items, players can either go out into the wilderness and try to obtain materials while also attacking and defending against monsters, or they can destroy items in the town. Pieces of furniture, for example, can turn into logs when destroyed, and those logs can then be gathered and used. Destroying town items like this can be a problem, though, as one developer illustrated by getting into a bar fight. After taking a few swings and firing a few bullets at some ruffians in the bar/strip club (which actually featured some dancing strippers, one of which was a skeleton), a large brawl erupted. In the chaos of the brawl, a few pieces of furniture got broken, dropping some nice looking pieces of material. However, at the same time, the developer lost a lot of gold, and told me that when you break town items, the town takes some of your gold to be able to re-purchase or repair the broken items.

Gold Rush

Although gold is important for, you know, buying stuff, it looks like gaining materials for crafting powerful gear can be just as important. There are a lot of different weapons, including melee weapons and guns, and I was told that some weapons can allow the player to go over the max level of 99 by granting him or her special levels (which I guess is similar to the Light Levels in Destiny).

I was also told that the game has already been submitted to Sony, and the developers are now just waiting for it to be approved, meaning Dragon Fin Soup could come out in the very near future. The turn-based RPG will be a cross-buy title, and although it might not be a cross-play game a launch, I was told that the developers will work on it after launch to enable a cross-play feature. From what I’ve seen, Dragon Fin Soup, which has been said will apparently take over 60 hours to complete if you play through all three of the game modes I talked about in my last preview, will be a fun and engaging game.