Dragon’s Dogma 2: What does an exclamation point on your minimap mean?

The exclamation points that appear on the mini-map in Dragon’s Dogma 2 are supposed to offer you useful hints, but they can cause more confusion than anything else. Sometimes, no matter what you do, they won’t disappear. And that’s because this game works differently to other games.

The Pawns in Dragon’s Dogma 2 like to talk a lot. Much of it is just inane chatter, but sometimes, they’re actually telling you something useful. On such occasions, you might even see an exclamation point appear on your minimap, but curiously, not on your main map. If you’ve played a lot of other games, then your gamer brain (like mine) will have been trained to pursue exclamation points until they have disappeared. But in Dragon’s Dogma 2, it’s often not at all clear what you have to do to make an exclamation point disappear.

What do exclamation marks do in Dragon’s Dogma 2?

A couple of the exclamation points I found in Dragon’s Dogma 2 really confused me, so I did some pretty thorough investigation to figure out how they work. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that they do not work like exclamation points in other games, and the rest comes from the inconsistent, slapdash way the game implements them.

First of all, you need to know that exclamation points in Dragon’s Dogma 2 are not objective markers like they usually are in other games. So, when you see one, that doesn’t mean you need to make your way to it to complete an objective. Instead, they merely mark some kind of environmental feature that one of your Pawns has identified as potentially useful. This could be a door, a ladder, a ledge, or some kind of hazard that you could use to your advantage. Sometimes, it’s pretty clear what an exclamation point refers to, and other times, it really isn’t. I’m going to use my experience in Trevo Mine to illustrate what I mean. 

In Trevo Mine, there’s a large chamber with sloped edges around its sides and several large boulders balanced precariously at the top of these slopes. When I reached this chamber, one of my Pawns pointed out that we could probably shift the boulders if we worked together. At that moment, an exclamation point appeared on one of the boulders, but not one of the two that were immediately in front of me. When I accidentally destroyed the supports holding the marked boulder up, it rolled to the bottom of the chamber, stopped, and then dramatically exploded. At the moment it exploded, the exclamation point disappeared. There were some odd details here, but the purpose of the exclamation point was relatively straightforward.

However, elsewhere in Trevo Mine, an exclamation point appears when one of your Pawns observes that a bridge is broken. The exclamation point simply marks a stone ledge that you can use to cross the gap instead of the bridge. It took me hours to figure that out, and there are various reasons why.

The first reason is that it first happened when I wasn’t in the relevant chamber; I was in the one directly below it, so I had no idea what bridge the Pawn was talking about. But it gets worse. After a lot of exploration, I reached the correct chamber, but it still wasn’t clear what the Pawn was talking about because the bridge was not broken, so the Pawn’s observation was inaccurate and useless. It was only after I broke the bridge, climbed down it, and then died jumping off it that I finally figured out what was going on. When I respawned, the exclamation mark had gone, but then it reappeared when one of my Pawns noted (again, and this time correctly) that the bridge was broken but that there was another way across, namely the stone ledge marked by the exclamation point.

How to make a minimap exclamation point disappear in Dragon’s Dogma 2

Sometimes, you can make a minimap exclamation point disappear in Dragon’s Dogma 2, but sometimes you can’t. The Trevo Mine examples I’ve outlined above illustrate how some of them mark things that are kinda consumable (e.g., boulders that smash), while others mark things that are permanent (e.g. the stone ledge). So, if you’re trying to figure out how to make an exclamation point disappear, my advice is… stop. You’re probably not missing out on anything if you don’t, and it might be that you can’t anyway.