Dragon's Dogma 2 has received another update this month, bringing good news to those who are worried that their pawns have been infected with the dreaded plague known as Dragon's Plague. Not only will the frequency of the Dragons' Plague be reduced, but it will also be easier to tell if a pawn has been affected.

Dragons' Plague is a mysterious disease that infects pawns, the customizable NPCs in the game. When infected with the disease, the infected pawns go insane and go berserk, wreaking havoc on the towns and villages in the game. Whether or not a pawn is infected with the dragon plague can be determined by whether or not its eyes are glowing. However, not only is it difficult to check a pawn's eyes in the game in the first place, but the virtual peephole only glows intermittently.

The update intends to take a three-pronged approach to adjusting the player's dragon spest experience. The first is to "reduce the frequency of infection" of the disease. It will also "adjust the signs of a pawn infected with the Dragons Plague to be more noticeable," adding that "for example, glowing eyes will be more prominent when infected." Finally, the update will also "add an option to magnify the faces of arisen and pawns on the status screen and in the store". The reason for this change was not stated, but it should make it easier for players to check for signs of dragon sprigs.

Besides these medical advances, the bulk of the update is devoted to tweaking pawn behavior, reducing the frequency of their dialogue, improving how their statements reflect events in the game world, and fixing behavior issues such as their inability to high-five players . My favorite fix is to make it harder for pawns to "fall off cliffs". Personally, I quite like the idea of walking around the open world with Wile E. Coyote, but I can imagine it gets frustrating after a while.

Other notable changes include a fix for the "fighting monsters in town puts players in jail" issue and a slight change to the minimap so that treasure chests, once acquired, are no longer displayed. A number of crashes and "miscellaneous" bugs not specifically listed have also been fixed.

One thing not mentioned in the update is an improvement to a widely reported game performance issue. Last we heard, Capcom is "looking at ways" to improve performance and is battling the fact that many of these issues are related to high CPU usage due to the game's massive character simulation. However, there has been no further word on this yet. As a result, the game is still only rated "Mixed" on Steam, even though it is otherwise an excellent game.