Square Enix wants to make Dragon Quest 12 more exciting and attract new players with their upcoming version. But what do we know about the Dragon Quest 12 ‘The Flames of Fate’ release date and features? Let’s find out.
Dragon Quest 12 Release Date Predictions
At the Dragon Quest 35th Anniversary livestream, they officially announced Dragon Quest 12 and a few other new Dragon Quest games.
However, The Flames of Fate doesn’t have an official release date yet, but since it’s been in development for some time, we can probably expect it to be available in 2024 or 2025.
“Best bet fall 2024 at the earliest if they wanna do a quick turnaround full reveal dragon quest day release that fall,” said one person on Reddit.
Another person wrote: “That’s how they always are with the DQ franchise. They make a big announcement, drop a couple of articles or teasers here and there, and then out of the blue, release date announcement. I would say late 2024, expect the big release date announcement in March of next year.”
Dragon Quest 12 The Flames of Fate story
The story of Dragon Quest 12: The Flames of Fate hasn’t been fully explained yet. We’ve only seen a short trailer that revealed the game’s title.
But, Yuji Horii, the creator of the series, described DQ 12 as a more mature version of Dragon Quest. This means it will have a darker and more serious story. Even though Dragon Quest usually has a cheerful tone, it has dealt with heavy topics like death, suicide, murder, captivity, and torture in the past, even though these stories usually end happily.
Moreover, Dragon Quest 12 will include more significant choices that affect the story. You can watch the brief teaser trailer for the game below:
Even though the trailer is in Japanese, a quick translation search gave us the interesting tagline, “what is the purpose of life?” or “why do people live?” It makes us curious about how daring Square Enix might get with Dragon Quest 12.
Dragon Quest 12 Gameplay
Dragon Quest 12: The Flames of Fate is the newest game in the Dragon Quest series, and it’s shaping up to be unique. This time, they’re using Unreal Engine 5, which will make it look incredibly impressive. We can’t wait to see how it looks in action.
Horii talked about how Dragon Quest 12 will have a completely new combat system. He didn’t give out all the details, but he mentioned they’re making significant changes to the command battle system, which is intriguing.
There’s been some speculation that the game’s gameplay might be somewhat like the Final Fantasy VII Remake, but we believe the team will bring fresh ideas to the traditional turn-based system we’ve seen in earlier games.
We’re also hoping for improvements in how we explore the game world. It was decent in Dragon Quest 11, but there’s room for it to be much better.
We’re not sure yet if it will be more like the simplified combat in Persona 5 or a big change like the combat in the Final Fantasy 7 Remake. We’ll have to wait and see.
Which platforms would be compatible?
Horii couldn’t say which gaming platforms Dragon Quest 12 will be available on. But, based on how they released Dragon Quest 11 on many different consoles and PC, we might see a similar pattern for DQ 12.
Interestingly, last September, there was a leak on NVIDIA’s GeForce Now that indicated they’re working on a PC version of the game.
It’ll likely be out on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, and not on other platforms.
PC requirements for the upcoming game
While Dragon Quest 12: The Flames of Fate using Unreal Engine 5 might have some performance challenges, it’s worth mentioning that Dragon Quest 11 didn’t demand a lot in terms of graphics. The key factor will be how Square Enix decides on the art style.
To give you a point of reference, Dragon Quest 11 had quite modest recommended requirements, including an AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or Intel Core i5-6500 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an AMD Radeon R7 370 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 GPU. These specs are far from what you’d need for the best budget gaming laptops. So, if Dragon Quest 12 follows a similar pattern, an RTX 3050 Ti or RTX 3060 GPU should work just fine.
