Looking at the resume of Capcom veteran Hideaki Itsuno, director of several fighting games and director of "Devil May Cry" since 2003, it is clear that he loves action games and is good at making them. However, the RPG "Dragon's Dogma" is a true passion of his, conceived in 2000 and completed over the course of eight years. "I've played every open RPG released in Japan: ...... Or I own them, and I plan to play them!" he told Videogamer.com in a 2012 interview.

Dragon's Dogma was Itsuino's big chance to create something completely new at Capcom, a completely original RPG of his own design. During his first decade at Capcom, Itsuino worked on a variety of Capcom's most beloved series. Early on, he worked on "Street Fighter Alpha" and co-directed the cult favorites "Rival School" and "Power Stone. He then went on to direct the classic "Capcom vs. SNK 2" and the little-remembered racing game "Auto Modellista," before taking charge of the "Devil May Cry" series. In the two decades since then, he has worked on either "DMC" or "Dragon's Dogma".

"In my time, the resources the team had were much more limited, so I was suddenly appointed director of games without any experience," Itsuno told PC Gamer in a recent interview.

"The reason for this is that the games are getting bigger, and with that comes more time and resources to complete them.

While this is a perfectly plausible explanation for why Itsuno has spent two-thirds of his career directing these two series, I didn't feel that Dragon's Dogma 2 offered the same exciting prospect of creating something entirely new as the first game. At this point, one wonders how many game ideas he has been warming up to over the decades.

"Of course, I'm not going to announce it here and now. It is a decision that has been made after considering all the circumstances surrounding it. But if I were to ignore all of that and follow my instincts, I think it would be fun to create something new."

Dragon's Dogma 2 has been warming up for a long time, he said, so making it is a much different experience than developing successive sequels.

"If you make a game and then immediately make a sequel, your priorities go to what's left over, what you couldn't do, and if you have 10 years, you can look back and say, 'What did I really want to do? One of the things I really wanted to create, whether it was Dragon's Dogma 1 or Dragon's Dogma 2, was to have a world of its own, and for me as a character to enter and affect that world.

"With 'Dragon's Dogma 1,' all we could do with the technology at the time was make it look like a world unto itself. But this time, by focusing on AI and utilizing current technology, we were able to create a world that was unique, and the people that lived in it, the monsters that lived in it, and the characters could influence those elements. I wanted to think of it as a simulator, and I think we achieved that."