Didn’t the Armored Core series have story arcs? Like they’re not all connected, right?
Yeah, as I recall this is how AC was, so I would 100% just expect like “Devil Souls” or something as the next game and just have it be clearly another iteration on the Souls series.
Basically, in the AC series, the numbered games indicated a new version of the formula that tweaked a few things(so like Bloodborne would be “Demon Souls 3”, basically), while the named ones were sequels within one number iteration (so Dark Souls 2 & 3). So I won’t be surprised when this is how it works for the Souls series, and I totally don’t expect them to stop, given that this is the most money they have ever made on anything in their like 20 years of being a company.
It kinda makes me sad, because I really want more AC games, but those are such a low priority for the company that I’m not surprised at them not being a thing. Specifically, I want more games like For Answer, which was actually Miyazaki’s first project that he was in charge of and was really neato.
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*at least in the AA/AAA-space
Yeah it’s always worth mentioning that while I think Dark 2 is the low point of the series it’s like, what the fuck other 3D action game am I supposed to be playing, the next Assassin’s fucking Creed? It’s slim pickins out there and From even at their worst just keeps putting out compelling experiences.
I’m actually replaying Uncharted 3 right now in its HD PS4 incarnation, and while I’m having fun with it I just keep staring at Bloodborne sitting on my TV stand and waiting for this game to be finished already.
People seemed excited about the bows in this game. Are they exciting?
Do mimics breathe again? Are there tail weapons? these are the true important questions.
I have next to zero interaction with the fanbase outside of this forum and, limitedly, Twitter, but I do think it’s unfortunate how a few YouTube users have become the Gatekeepers of Lore. I can imagine being more involved with the community (however that’s defined) and feeling like it’s no longer this collective archaeology and instead an attempt to reach the understanding that a few chosen players have gotten a head start on.
The cathedral owns
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Quick thoughts (hopefully spoiler-lite):
Beginning of the game is kinda tap-footy but once I got 3+ bosses deep I like the game. More freeform areas than DS2, certainly more gorgeous (though the apparent lack of a beach disappoints me…haven’t found one yet).
I’ve been having a hard time integrating many weapon skills into my playstyle, though, unless they’re a direct attack – I always feel wary about stopping to refresh my Butcher Knife sharpen buff, thinking to myself “In the 3-second period where I used that whiffed boss attack to rebuff Sharpen, I could just have run in there and gotten free regular hits on the boss’s butt.” I’m mostly just getting used to getting a quick sense of how long the buffs last when applied so I can maximize uptime.
The bosses are definitely more interesting mechanically than most of the ones in DS2 (I never played Bloodborne). 1st boss was a novelty to be sure. Enemies for the most part seem to have parity with DS2 in how troublesome they are. Most of them seem pretty easy to bulldoze, but I’m playing an STR/pyro/fastroll build and apparently they balanced this game’s stats for me (STR > all, even after greatsword nerf)
From the way they talked about the game’s setting I thought it would be way more up its ass with ham-handed DS1 fanservice. But thankfully that doesn’t actually seem to be the case with this game, at least not to the point where I’ve gotten. More than okay with this because TBH I liked DS2’s setting a lot more (gasp, shock, horror, I guess).
I’ve been non-Embered for most of the game and haven’t really missed having phantoms on most bosses so far. In fact most bosses, I feel, are much EASIER to work with when the only aggro target is you. I kinda hate hacking at a boss’s ass while a phantom has aggro because it makes it harder for me to read how aggro might shift during an attack tell (plus harder for me to tell when the boss might try an anti-flanking attack like a buttslam or something). Part of me feels that NG difficulty is lowballing it in this game, but then I remembered how easy MOST of DS2’s NG was. Same deal with DS1 until you get to, like, O&S.
Road of Sacrifices is completely gorgeous. Can we just make a Souls game that takes place entirely in RoS? Throw a gratuitous beach in there with a Crestfallen Italian Ice Vendor and a blacksmith in a Hawaiian shirt?
Best swamp in the series, by far. Praise the constant framerate! (No, I don’t consider the presence of a swamp to be a spoiler. This is Dark Souls. There is always a swamp.)
Yeah I just got through the cathedral and I loved it. I hope there are at least a couple of more areas as thoughtfully designed.
I will say, this has some of the most evocative landscapes I’ve seen in any 3D game. It’s doing the good ol’ thing of letting you look back and see multiple places you’ve traversed (which didn’t happen much in Bloodborne), but the higher level of detail and fidelity is really impressive. One of my favorite moments was being able to scale part of a pier on the bridge leading to the Undead Settlement from the swamp’s base. I like that feeling of interacting with some monumental iterative piece of architecture you don’t expect to have direct contact with.
This is a view from the cathedral, but it shows the bridge I’m referring to.
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This isn’t wrong – DkS3 has no new ideas that haven’t been touched on previously in the series – but it’s also unfair. This game is really the culmination and perfection and coherization of all those previous ideas, it’s about taking what was previously half-baked and making it complete.
You said that this game feels like a grab bag of Souls assets tossed together but that’s exactly upside down from my point of view, DkS1 and 2 are the grab bags and this one is the only coherent world. (Demon’s is also coherent but within its isolated pieces.) This series has been struggling the whole time with a dichotomy between variety and coherency in an interconnected world and this is the first entry to really solve it. Remember how absurd the 5-minute run from Undead Parish to Demon Ruins by way of Drake Valley was? The sudden phase transitions into gloomy Darkroot and lava-filled Demon Ruins were jarring and made the world feel like a theme park, not organically grown. DkS3 has no equivalent, observe in particular how slowly the heat builds up as you go underground and only the bottom depths have deadly lava. And observe how good a job DkS3 does at showing future areas at a distance, I recommend revisiting the first High Wall bonfire after beating the game to see for yourself. The one surprise transition into Irithyll comes after cutting underground through a mountain and is thematically and spatially appropriate. (Yes, it comes at the cost of some nonlinearity, but in my opinion the key benefits of nonlinearity – flexibility to take another path when frustrated, and a sense of interconnectedness – are preserved.)
As another, smaller example, DkS3 is the first to thematically nail the alive/dead-but-really-always-dead dichotomy with the right terminology. Demon’s Souls had the “body form” and “soul form” business – that didn’t really make sense because the soul form still had the same physicality and weight. In DkS1 you were “human” or “hollow”, but hollows were supposed to go insane and you never did, and it was tied to this half-baked humanity counter system that was probably supposed to play a greater role in the game than it did. “Embered” or not finally feels right, either way you’re ashes but with the ember you have more energy, and it also much better explains the restorative power of bonfires.
I have more arguments about the loose ends DkS3 has finally tied but they would go too much into spoiler territory, I’ll get to them later in the thread.
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There is a boss later on that is all about this and it went from being a fight I hated at first to a fight I have done a bunch and now really enjoy. There is something really particular about this kind of play (aggro baiting) that adds a layer to the multiplayer experience that I couldn’t put my finger on before. Dark Souls III is the first game where I felt like, when I brought in other players, I began to notice how enemies would react and adjust accordingly because you couldn’t steamroll over all of them (a good number of them you can, however).
these are good points, and my main rebuttal is that the theme park feeling of the first DkS didn’t really become an issue until the late game (if you remove demon ruins and izalith from this example, which you basically can because they’re functionally a dead end once you go beyond blighttown, it’s not nearly as blatant, and everyone always picks on these two areas for this, compared to DkS2 where it really was an issue to the point of just being silly), whereas DkS3 is so lacking in narrative thrust that the worldbuilding really suffers by comparison. likewise, I agree that the increased linearity isn’t really a huge issue in terms of how the game is played, but it does impact the sense of interconnectedness for me, particularly in the context of area designs that Souls has used before. by the time I made it to irithyll, I wasn’t thinking “I’ve come a long way since the high wall of lothric!” so much as “OK, there was the boletaria level, and then the village level, and then the swamp level, and something something nito after that.” even if it looks better in your head, declining to revisit locations the way you would the undead parish or darkroot does keep it from really sticking for me.
the embered language is good, but – it doesn’t really seem to have much analog in the rest of the world? sure, you never suffer from insanity per se in the first game, but that’s because it’s not Eternal Darkness for the gamecube, and it’s more than fair to say that the “insanity” of being hollowed was intended to be borne out in the frustration of playing dark souls in the first place. at best, the language change is a polish thing (and a course correction from something that DkS2 really whiffed on). everything good in this game is a polish thing.
compared to witcher 3 where everything good in the game was a Polish thing
I had a pretty big problem with the transition into Darkroot and into New Londo as well. The elevator down straight from Firelink into the ghost-infested abyss is kind of ridiculous. I also feel that the existence of Anor Londo should’ve been telegraphed in some way in DkS1, it’s kind of absurd to have this fancy city on a hill and none of its towers poke out into view or anything, particularly since it doesn’t seem the demongoyles fly you very far.
I think some of the late game you haven’t seen touches on these arguments too, I’ll be interested to see how your opinion evolves.
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the only real novel things I’ve come across storywise have happened very recently (like, in the last hour or so that I played yesterday) and only real novel in the context of “where are they now” from the first game, which is a bit lame:
gwyndolin is strongly implied to have survived and set all of this in motion (so I guess his bossfight was non-canon, whee), and there’s some tribe called the drang who at least briefly occupied anor londo after the events of the first game?
Well, it’s really just one piece of the better coherency around the fire theming. To revisit another thing you said, “there is as much justification for having to defeat four lords of cinder as with eight robot masters.” That’s another thing that applies much more to DkS1 than this game. In DkS1 you for some reason went to ring two “Bells of Awakening” (another theming with no fire element), then you got the “Lordvessel” which for some reason opens a bunch of gates. It’s all over the place and pure videogame logic.
In DkS3 the goal is to drag the Lords of Cinder back to their thrones, dead or alive. Which, OK, is also videogame logic, but in a good way. And the one pathetic Lord of Cinder voluntarily sitting on his throne is a clever touch by putting some doubt in your mind about signing up for this linking the fire business (in DkS1 you had to talk to Kaathe to realize Frampt was selling you a bill of goods, there was very little hinting at it otherwise).
That’s a Dark Souls 2 callback, remember Drangleic?
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oh, ha! duh.
having one lord of cinder sitting on his throne is terrific, I’ll give them that.
Another thing I love is that many of the thrones are too small to fit the Lord who’s supposed to be sitting on them. Even the guys who built the thrones never planned for the Lords to sit on them except in ash form to begin with.
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I feel like in any game where “magic” is a central theme, a lot of videogame logic can be excused without really breaking anything, as long as it’s not contradicted by its function internally (not necessarily externally, or as it relates to other series entries, necessarily). Granted, this is cheating, but there is always going to be some of that in any videogame where the primary action is fighting stuff.
edit: I will say that one of the things I enjoyed was seeing more enemies fighting amongst one another, rather than necessarily always fighting you. The idea that there is a laser focus on you as the player (and enemies somehow knowing “you”) all the time sometimes seems odd in the Dark Souls series generally, since so much of the series hinges on the world always being at a zero state, no matter what anyone does or tries to do to change it. The coming grey seems like it would be a bit more hopeless, but it’s nice that there are some subtle explanations for why that might be in DSIII (mostly related to the secret ending).
god dammit how do you do spoiler text I thought there was just a button you push
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