Dragon's Dogma

- Make sure that you always play in Online mode. If you are not given the option on load you should press Start, go down to Options, Gameplay tab, and set Connectivity to Online and Main Pawn Online Access to Anyone. If you are not online with Anyone pawn access then your pawn will not be available to hire by other players and you will lose out on a huge source of Rift Crystals (RC), the currency used to hire party member pawns and purchase several items in-game.

- There's an early story quest (the Pawn Guild one) that has two creatures you aren't capable of fighting directly, confusing the shit out of a lot of people. You can kill one by getting it to run off a cliff, but the other you have to run away from.

- After doing everything at the encampment there are some quests you can take on that you can actually do but they're ridiculously hard if you're new to the game. If you have trouble with them, just carry on with the main plot-line.

- There're two stores in the residential district of Gran Soren (The Black Cat, which lets you make forgeries, and the barber, which... barbers). They're hard to find, but get added to your map when you do.

- The difficulty levels off really really hard, the entire game becomes a cakewalk at level 75 or so, earlier if you're an Assassin. Don't grind for levels or dcp.

- Don't be afraid of switching vocations, as long as you don't spend 50 levels playing with the same class you won't be gimped. Capcom did a great job with making them feel much different, so if you get bored - try switching.

- When you first arrive in Gran Soren, visit the inn, and see that you now have the ability to change to a two-handed weapon-wielding Warrior, resist the temptation to switch your vocation and deck yourself out in appropriate gear. The weapons cost 20k, which will be quite expensive that point; they swing extremely slowly and have long recovery times, with the bonus addition of having a stagger and longer recovery (much like in the Souls games) if you don't land an attack; the activated attacks are even slower than normal weapon swings, with prohibitively long animations, charge times, recovery times, and seriously small areas of effect (despite their anime-huge weapon designs), so much so that I had a lot of trouble simply landing Savage Lash (the default ability) before the enemies lost interest in me (or moved nine inches to the side (seriously super fucking small area of effect)) and ran off to attack my pawns. Due to the two-handed weapon type you only get offensive (right shoulder button) abilities, rather than offensive and defensive (left shoulder) abilities from a shield or offhand weapon. And because the attacks are for two-handed weapons only, none of them will transfer over to other vocations because no other classes can use heavy weapons. I restarted my game because I was so dejected from going broke that garbage pile of a class. Maybe they're better later in the game, I don't doubt that they are, but at the beginning it will drain your funds and skill points and leave you bummed the fuck out.

- There's a fat merchant that wanders around, and he'll eventually give you a quest to escort his stupid looking little daughter around town. This quest is as idiotic as it sounds, but apparently if you DON'T complete it "correctly" you screw yourself out of a unique item that you can only get once per playthrough. It's not necessary, but it'll make it easier, and it'll be something you don't have to wait until a NG+ for. Just use a guide- it's a seriously uninteresting quest and it's easy to screw up.

- If playing for the first time, look up weight classes before creating anyone. Weight classes govern hit-boxes, item burden and stamina consumption.

- When creating your main pawn, try to offset your current build. If you're a Fighter, consider making them a Strider for ranged attacks or a Mage for the range and healing. If you are short and light, consider making your pawn tall and heavy so they can carry all the stuff you find.

- Always carry flasks of oil, since your lamp will assuredly run out at the worst possible time.

- Don't rely solely on healing spells to recover your health. Your maximum health will drop after taking sufficient damage, and only recharge to the grey coloured cap. You can't always wait for a full heal spell, so keep some healing items for an immediate health boost past the cap.

- Also carry some stamina recovery items in case you need to run a long distance, whether towards or away from somewhere.

- Additional enemies spawn during the night compared to the day. Stay at an inn and leave town in the morning.

- When hiring extra pawns, they will not require Rift Crystals if they are the same level as you. If you are level 10, pawns that are level 1 through 10 will cost zero crystals. You can swap out these free pawns after every couple of quests or even every time you level up. This is important because some merchants only accept Rift Crystals as currency.

- The higher the pawn level, the more Rift crystals they'll require. When you pay, check out their equipment, skills and quest knowledge to get the most out of them.

- Pawn "inclinations" influence how a pawn acts, and some of them aren't as useful as they sound.

- To give an example, Guardian sounds like it would be useful on a fighter pawn if you're a squishy wizard type. It's not, really. It makes it so the pawn doesn't really engage enemies until they take a shot at you and prioritizes staying close to you, even after taunting that big nasty ogre with wide rushing attacks that can flatten you. Guardian mages will also prioritize staying close to you over actually getting any spells off.

- Scather encourages grappling on big enemies, so while it's great on a Strider, a Scather Mage might try to uselessly climb a cyclops instead of using spells.

- Medicant encourages healing, so while it's good on a support Mage, you want it as a secondary inclination. If it's primary, the Mage will stop casting buffs or damage spells whenever anyone so much as skins their knee.

- Be careful when using pawn commands, because they can cause shifts in pawn inclinations. Using "come" in battle too often will shift your pawn into Guardian, while "Help me" will add Medicant tendency.

- You can force pawn inclination changes to your main pawn by using elixirs sold in the same room where you first got your pawn. The merchant that sells them shows up a main quest or two later. They cost rift crystals, which you can get a lot of easily if other players hire your pawn.

- You don't actually lose your pawn when it's hired out, other players just get a copy and you get rewarded after they finish with it and you rest at an inn.

- Character level and class ranks are unrelated. The only prerequisite to switching to a class is being character level 10 and having enough discipline points to buy the new class. Once you have acquired a class, switching to or from it has no cost. Advanced and hybrid classes are not straight upgrades, the base classes have their own niches. Warrior is the advanced Fighter class, but gives up on a shield for a huge two-handed weapon, so Fighters are still tankier, to give an example.

- Stat growth is determined by what class you have active when you gain a character level. You can min/max by leveling with a class with good growth for the class you want to use (like Assassin for the best physical attack growth). Dragon's Dogma isn't hard enough that you have to do this. Don't get to max level before playing the class you actually want to play. You'll steamroll everything by then no matter what you do.

- There are sidequests that are only available during specific parts of the story. Unless you use a guide, you WILL miss some. If you care about 100% completion, http://dragonsdogma.wikia.com/wiki/...est_Progression tries to keep the spoilers light until you click on the links for more details.

- keep at least 10 of everything in the Material category for upgrades. Shove everything in Other into your box, as it's likely quest related.

- builds are largely unimportant. Switching classes for their cross-class skills IS important. The game is a pain to min-max and the benefits are pretty meager, so go nuts.

- your pawn will be stupid at the outset of your journey no matter how patrician you are at the game. Proper inclination setup will help, but growing your pawn's bestiary knowledge will help even more.

- only Mages have healing magic and they also get some of the best buffs (for the classes pawns can be, anyway). Once you're well on your way to godhood you can forego the Mage for more firepower, but early on they're pretty indispensable

- you can switch from Hard to Normal/Easy anytime, but going from anything to Hard will move your character over to a NG cycle. Do this and then switch back to Normal if you feel you've fucked something up extremely badly (failing Lost and Found or Chasing Shadows are good reasons).

- Hard Mode increases monster damage by 450% and doubles your stamina drain, among other things. It also drops crazy gold and doubles your EXP and DCP (job points). I wouldn't do it on a fresh lvl1 character, but in NG+ it's worth checking out.

- Character weight is a non-issue as it doesn't take too long to unlock the trait in the Fighter tree that increases the Light-Weight window size. There's also a Stalker trait that allows you to run at one threshold below your current encumbrance.