Feeling pretty much the same way. I’ve played this game the least in spite of finally finding a melee weapon I enjoy using. In general I enjoy the combat of DS3 way more than any other in the series, but I don’t think that was what kept me playing the series.
I don’t think the music is bad, but it’s not nearly as memorable as Demon’s Souls (I don’t really remember any tracks from DS1 other than Firelink, same with DS2). That said, I think a lot of that is just a result of the music not being as clearly tied to the enemies. The music is more of a generic spooky and discordant variety than descriptive of enemy personality. Which is fine, that’s probably the best you can do when you have to put out these massive games every few years, rather than having some time to stir the pot.
That’s exactly why it’s bad, though. Context and distinction is key. I mean, the soundtrack is also compositionally cliched as fuck (time to transpose tritone shit forever over whole tone scale), but it’s almost entirely interchangeable between the bosses, ergo my comment about Gundyr’s theme vs. the final boss’ theme. I’m convinced at this point that Sakuraba is just a mediocre composer incapable of nuance whose inadequacies have just been exasperated by the huge amount of work he’s taken on, and that he’s only ever been really good at occasionally writing exciting inventive prog-rock battle themes. Aside from several bombs I’d always turn the music off for, Bloodborne had a good soundtrack with boss themes that stuck to concrete melodic gestures with an underlying stylistic theme derived from east-European music, and that was also a pretty quickly made game. I don’t think Dark’s compositional teams could ever do a good job (even if 3 shares one of BB’s composers), no matter how much time they were given.
I genuinely can’t remember a single audio track from Bloodborne. I played it more than DS3 but it still probably did the least for me of any of the games. Trick weapons are the one thing I really remember from that game. I want to say Bloodborne’s music was bland but I’m actually having a hard time recalling what the game’s music was.
Having thought about Bloodborne for a bit, I now remember some of the phrases (Grant us Eyes, Kos, some say Kosm) and boss names (Rom, Gascoigne, Lady Maria), so that’s a good indication that the bosses had some nice personality tied up with them, but I still can’t recall musical themes attached to them. Bloodborne’s truly memorable thing is definitely its visual style though. It captures Victorian Gothic in a way no other game has, before or since.
That said, I have a feeling I won’t remember much about DS3 either, other than it having good combat and bad online. It’s weird to say, but it seems like DS2’s online has been the best for PC so far - the fact that DS2 is the high point is pretty disappointing though, given that the online for DS2 is just average at best. Abyss Watchers was the high point of DS3 for me, which is very strange given that the boss is maybe 1/3 of the way through the game. I wonder if that was intentional given the general understanding that most people never beat these games. Old Demon King was also pretty cool, mostly for the last quarter of that healthbar where you feel like you’re putting the king down. It was a weird, but somehow thematically appropriate moment. I wish the animations for other bosses in the game were as wonderfully overstated.
I can’t imagine playing the series for hundreds of hours for its combat. It’s pretty limited, and works best of all when it’s contextualized by the level design. That’s why it’s always frustrated me that nearly all the places which become unofficially designated as versus arenas are flat clearings or bridges. I get that that’s done for balance, but the online is already so problematic that I’d rather just combat people in less stable scenarios. Fighting others in Dark’s forest – for a while, back in 2012 – was really the only fun I ever had with the games in this way, and a lot of that was because of the naturalistic topography and low visibility. It led to more dynamic and unpredictable situations.
It reads pretty well up until it starts talking about encounter difficulty in terms of easy → hard, which has never really been what Souls encounters are about. Each encounter will vary in difficulty largely by the situation in which it puts you and your own ability to react to that. Some require much more situational awareness (encounters with more enemies) while others are purely about reaction speed (how fast, and with how much precision, can you press the dodge button), while still others are about patterning (enemies that seem hard but are easy or very predictable at certain ranges, have predictable deadzones - Vordt is the first real example of this).
The article’s alright but kinda falls off when it starts talking about difficulty in a very linear way.
As for how DS3 teaches basic functionality, I feel it does its job, but doesn’t really teach the more important aspects that will actually make the game more manageable (how to improve your Estus flask, for example - I didn’t figured out how Undead Bone Shards worked for a very long time and was using the basic, non-upgraded flask up until after the Dancer boss fight). Most of the stuff it teaches will be learned by the player if they just keep playing, so how necessary or helpful it is, I’m unsure.
Could not agree more with this, but DS3 and BB both read this way to me. They are very much about their combat, and combat + design aspects are frequently ignored by most of the playerbase (especially the PvP sector). It’s also why people praise BB so much - the combat is clearly the focus and a lot of players (likely the majority) are playing this for its combat. Just about every article I read on BB or DS3 talks about how good the game feels to play. Weighty swings, etc., can’t really be ignored by the devs in order to placate that section of the playerbase, in spite of the design being what actually makes all of that feel properly powerful.
Well I just got past Yhorm the Giant and that was an odd little sequence. I didn’t really fight the boss as I apparently did all the Siegward stuff so that he showed up. Felt bad as it seemed to cheese the boss battle but reading up afterwards it seemed a bit cheesy regardless (I like the Demons Souls throwback aspect of it, but it feels like it makes a lot sense contextual sense here). Then I get warped away immediately to someplace else by that character who then dies, and then I trigger another boss battle before I can even get any sort of bearings. Luckily I had a homeward bone handy, it was a bit awkward overall.
I actually really like the level design in Dark Souls 3 so far. It often folds in on itself in interesting little ways (less so between different areas though) and I’m really enjoying seeing how they are all put together.
At this point i almost wonder if it is because I use a JP account with the US server but havent invested the two hours to run through the game on a US account.
In all likelihood it’s either related to your weapon’s upgrade level or your character’s level. Those are the two factors used for matchmaking, and in general if you’re outside the “normal” (i.e. +/- 10 of the levels mentioned in the table below) range of the area in question, either level-wise or weapon-upgrade, you’ll have a hard time matchmaking. At least I did.
I’ve been giving a little thought to the High Wall of Lothric, as 3’s first non-tutorial gauntlet, in comparison to the Undead Burg and I’m not sure where to go with it except that there’s such a big difference between the two in how they create drama through which enemies you encounter. Every enemy in the Burg, except the sole Black Knight (whose importance is heightened by that very contrast), is a grunt of some sort, whereas the High Wall matches you up against powerful and tall pike- and axe-wielders, Lothric knights, a winged knight, two hollows that explode into massive screaming monstrosities if they’re not taken care of right away, and even a dragon that sticks around (should you take that path). It’s a reactionary sort of approach to enemy placement that does lend itself to a greater challenge, but I also wonder what it does for the player’s perception of the environment as a narrative.
My general issue with DS3 is just that this isn’t nearly as effective as it has been in the past. I think some of that is due to the game’s speed. Some of that is also just moving too quickly between world-space contexts. A LOT of that is due to enemy placement.
Granted, I don’t think it’s worse than Dark Souls 1 either. Different though.
High Wall I see as more comparable to 1-1 in Demon’s Souls, which also had dragons and blue/red-eye knights and shares the detail that you can see the end of the game in the distance from the starting position. They also both do more with verticality than Burg did: 1-1 has you going all the way up then down, while High Wall has you spiraling downward from a high point. (Whereas Burg is somewhat flat and mostly has you go up and down small flights of stairs, and the only real rise is in the Taurus Demon tower.)
With respect to vividness of the enemies, it’s really the giant black wraithlike tentacles that are the striking enemy in the early areas. Then they never show up again. And in the late-game, Champion Gundyr actively makes a point out of not having them. I think there’s some intended narrative message here. Perhaps that the superficially most peripheral, least corrupted areas are in reality the most of all.
Hadn’t thought about this as an environmental message from the game but thinking on the design it seems to fit really well. Makes me do a bit of a rethink on Untended Graves as being more than just reiteration, instead acting as an indication of (pure?/true?) corruption. Oceiros is also the only boss really clearly defined as mad and is the closest to that area. The generic theme of there being something darker just under the surface does seem to permeate DS3 in a way that is uncommon for the Souls series. In all of them, even Bloodborne, the theme has always seemed to be about what is essentially the breakout period of corruption, rather than the incubation period. Still, if DS3 was about that incubation, the game still often seems uncommonly dense with combat.
Mostly, I just miss areas where the only thing you could really do with them is view them as curiosities. Out-of-the-way spaces with seemingly little purpose other than revealing a ruined glory are fascinating to me, especially in a game like Souls, where the focus is so heavily on combat (and also because placement is so intentional and thought out). Room to breathe seems limited to bonfires in DS3 and that’s kind of unfortunate because the bonfire has always ticked some sort of managerial switch in me, distracting me from taking in the environment. I’m finding now that waiting on in-game triggers (i.e. grinding covenants) has allowed me to do a little more of this, but that’s also somewhat distracting since I’m still mostly thinking about what’s going to happen when the trigger goes off (i.e. how to tackle players, not how the environment extends the game).
Depends how you understand progression in the game, but I see Lothric Castle as a later area, and it does have… I want to say five of the half-hollow/half-pus creatures, plus the two blobs that are reanimating the couple of dragons.
I was looking at those leaked images from last year again and noticed that parts of the High Wall are overgrown with black, tendriled masses that don’t show up anywhere in the final game. Wonder what they were supposed to be.
Oh, yeah! I agree. I’m only comparing it to the Burg because it’s a part of the Dark series and ostensibly is a return to the first game’s design principles after Dark 2. Maybe that’s ultimately a fruitless comparison, though.
…Huh? It’s the path right next to the start of the High Wall of Lothric.[quote=“janitor, post:602, topic:1250, full:true”]
the burg exists for me to kill the shopkeep so i can get an early uchi and then double-back and use the master key to skip the entire area
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This is a sort of min-max/speedrunning perspective of the game that I’m not really interested in.
In what ways? Also Yharnam is, like… most of Bloodborne. Seems like an unwieldy comparison, unless you’re thinking of a particular section of the city.
