Mysterious, Viral Dragon’s Dogma 2 Mechanic Infecting Player’s Pawns

Reports of a mysterious affliction infecting the Pawns of Dragon’s Dogma 2 players, the AI-assisted NPC companion each player creates, have begun to trickle in. This sinister disease is known as Dragonsplague and affected Pawns will exhibit red glowing eyes, incoherent speech, disobedience, and increased aggression. Letting one into your party can have catastrophic, permanent consequences for your game world and inadvertently spread to others. This is an evolving situation. Vague mechanical spoilers for Dragon’s Dogma 2 to follow!

According to IGN, currently, there’s no way to tell if a Pawn is infected before hiring them within the Rift, where the Pawns of other players gather, but the signs above will quickly become known upon hiring. If left unchecked, resting in an inn can result in the infected Pawn transforming into some kind of shadow dragon and destroying the settlement, potentially offing some still-useful normal NPCs. It sounds pretty draconian to us (if you’ll pardon the pun), but it’s an incredibly cool addition to an already compelling, emergant game.

The good news is that Dragonsplague is easy to deal with—provided it’s not your Pawn infected and you spot the early warning signs. A tutorial box will pop up the first time you encounter a Pawn afflicted with the mechanic, and from that point, you’ll have a few in-game days to dismiss them, problem solved. The dragon cutscene can only trigger when resting in an inn, so sleep rough until you get it sorted.

Grimly, you cannot dismiss your Pawn, so more drastic measures are required if your personal Samwise comes down with the sickness. So far, the brightest minds in the Dragon’s Dogma 2 community have found only a single, admittedly hardline cure to stop the insidious spread of Dragonsplague: Death by drowning. Push your Pawn into a large body of water, wash them clean of sickness, and return to a Riftstone to re-summon them, free of taint.