Highlights
- Animating cooking meat may not be as easy as you think, as one game writer learns from Dragon’s Dogma 2.
- Even gaming experts can make mistakes, like confusing live-action for animation in a beloved game.
- Embracing a mistake with humor showcases a love for gaming progress, even from veteran devs like Emil Pagliarulo.
Cooking meat at a campfire in Dragon’s Dogma 2 is probably one of the most mouth-watering experiences in gaming (unless you’re a vegetarian). Whether you’re grilling up a scrumptious Beast Steak or a more meager Scrag of Beast, the scene that plays out just after you select your campsite picnic dinner really brings home the justification for all the stat boosts your Arisen and Pawns will wake up with.
But for one well-known figure in the gaming industry, his love for that particular section of the game has drawn a fair amount of ribbing (get it?). Still, he seems to be taking it all in stride.
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Emil Pagliarulo, most recently known for his work as the lead writer of the 2023 space exploration RPG Starfield, took to X (formerly Twitter) on April 5 and gushed over the “animation” of the meat-cooking scenes, even going so far as to call for The Game Awards to create a new category just to honor it.
While it’s hard to argue with Pagliarulo’s enthusiasm, other keen-eyed gaming connoisseurs were quick to call out one fatal flaw in his praise for that aspect of Dragon’s Dogma 2: that cooking meat is live-action video, not an animation. In addition to the typical string of reply tweets correcting him for his gaffe, someone even helpfully added a Community Note to the tweet, citing two articles in which the game’s director, Hideaki Itsuno, has stated that fact previously.
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Savoring That Humble Meat Pie
Showing no signs of vanity, Pagliarulo seems to be pretty amused by his mistaken assumption, and he’s also showing that he’s not afraid to laugh at himself. After being called out for it, he made a follow-up tweet in which he both acknowledged his “dumb” mistake and stated that he was not going to take the original post down, both for it’s comedic appeal and because of his love for the ever-evolving advances in gaming technology.
He’s not exactly wrong, either. Paliarulo is no slouch in the gaming industry. While not everyone was enamored with the writing in Starfield — and to be fair, it did have its fair share of weaknesses — Pagliarulo has been with Bethesda Game Studios for a long time now, and he’s played a big part in some of the most popular RPGs of the last 15 years or so. He served as senior designer and writer for both Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, and he won the Game Developers Choice Awards’ Best Writing award in 2008 after fulfilling those same roles for Fallout 3.
“I just can’t with these animations. They’re… insanely good.” – Emil Pagliarulo
Like Starfield, Dragon’s Dogma 2 seems to be a pretty divisive game, with a lot of players absolutely loving it and others constantly trash-talking a lot of its aspects, including the graphics. Whether you’re choosing to laugh at or with Pagliarulo is your own perspective. Either way, it’s nice to see developers supporting rival developers, and his enthusiasm, however misplaced, can be looked at as an inspiration for the innovations that make gaming great.
