"Dragon’s Dogma is a really valuable IP to us. We knew we wanted to make a sequel at an early stage, but there wasn’t really one particular thing that just changed from no to a green light. It was more that we needed a lot of things to fall into place.

First and foremost, if Itsuno-san doesn’t have time to be the director of the game, it can’t really get made. So having an opportunity to have him spend the time he needed on the game and being able to bring together the other resources needed, such as a large team to work on a game with this scope, just took some years for that all to really fit together. And then once it did, we got started."