I’ve reached a similar roadblock with another boss in the late-game that has something of an annoying runback, and kind of feeling the same way.
I don’t know what it is. I respect that this game is good, but I also don’t care to finish it despite being so close. This is a first for me. Is the ending interesting or thought provoking? Is it worth trucking through?
Might depend on what you’re looking for.
I will say that they’re about as short as the series’ endings have tended to be.
Watch them on Youtube. They aren’t very long, and they all have pretty different implications for the Souls universe. I never really hit a major roadblock in the game, so maybe just breaking with it for a while might help. Also, by never happened before do you mean you’ve never hit such a roadblock in a game, or just in a Souls game? I drop games quite frequently if they don’t capture me and roadblocks are probably one of the reasons I’ll never finish Witcher 3, despite wanting to.
This is the first “souls” game where it’s happened. It has happened with other games (not sure if I’ll finish Witcher myself). I do feel a bit of inclination to play Bloodborne again though.
Just in case some people still haven’t seen it.
I’m nearing the end of this. exploring the untended graves although apparently that’s an optional area? I couldn’t figure out where else to go.
maybe I’ve finally “gotten good” or whatever but I’m not finding this game to be much harder than 1 or 2. bloodborne was still way more challenging. there have been a handful of bosses that were pretty tricky, but nothing like orphan of kos yet from bb. this isn’t a bad thing, exactly! I agree that aldritch was a great boss. the trick with a lot of souls bosses, especially the non sword and board types, is knowing when to lock off for evasion. a lot of her (his?) scarier magic attacks can be avoided much more easily if you take off lock on and move laterally to her line of sight.
I spent a ton of time reading up on the lore of dark 1 and 2 to prepare for this, and a lot of the implications of this game are confusing, but I have to say even the most fan servicey stuff seems to serve some other narrative purpose. the most confusing part is that it seems to agreed by a lot of lore people that drangleic is lordran many generations past. I guess this game totally wrecks that theory bc it’s very very obviously the same site as lordran. you even find the crown of oolacile in farron keep alongside elizabeth’s corpse (presumably?) along with a handful of other ancient mushroom corpses, and then there’s huge chunks of izalith
(a side note: did anyone else totally see anor londo coming? it seems like they broadcast it fairly early on, even from certain npc dialogue and stuff. all doubts were removed when I saw the paintings of the duke’s fortress and gwynevere in the mansion in irithyll, populated by silver knights. but the entire presence of it above this weird holy city where apparently at least one resident was a big ds1 fanboy is pretty confusing. maybe I need to read more item descriptions or something?)
comparing ds3’s map to ds1’s, it seems like their relative locations don’t really line up with how they were in the first game, but I guess it’s been thousands or years or whatever and there’s magic at work and stuff? I haven’t pored over stuff too carefully so maybe I’m making some dumb assumptions
I haven’t seen anyone really talk about how different the tone of this game is. it seems actually relatively upbeat. you aren’t called the cursed/chosen undead, instead people refer to you by much more flattering titles like ashen one and champion of ash. you don’t hollow unless you “opt in” to, even if it’s kind of unwitting in true souls fashion. maybe most tellingly, the “ember” mechanic, while mechanically identical to hollowing in demons souls, still has a very different feeling narratively because being “embered” is presented as a bonus to your natural HP. you don’t feel like something that belongs to you is being taken away as punishment – more that you are being temporarily rewarded for succeeding against bosses and the like. I’m interested in y’alls take on why the game seems to adopt this kind of attitude. it feels super different to me.
I go back and forth between feeling it’s redundant and not. the further I get I actually feel like it’s doing something pretty different from the first two games in terms of atmosphere and level design, even if it is olbiged to retread a lot of the same level themes, they are approached with a fresh spin for the most part and it always feels purposeful. my personal favorite location so far was the irithyll dungeon, mainly for being a pleasant throwback to 3-1 in demon’s but also being a really great horror game in miniature. but despite it being a throwback it very much feels like it’s own place and I haven’t yet felt that any of these types of areas were “obligatory”. in the end, even the redux of anor londo succeeds at creating its own atmosphere and sense of purpose which is wholly different from that in dark 1.
I thought that assumption about Drangleic was always based on really flimsy justifications, though, like “Heide’s Tower of Flame looks like Anor Londo” or “Some of the major souls you obtain are warped versions of major souls from Dark Souls” (which seems to rule out of the possibility that, hey, maybe souls can not only transmigrate but also migrate great physical distances). But yeah, re: conflicting geographies, you probably just have to roll with the idea that this takes place who knows how many years after the events of Dark Souls and suspend some of your disbelief when it comes to believable topographical evolution. How much you’re supposed to suspend, I’m not sure.
imo embering is the most well realized evolution of the body/soul dichotomy from Demon’s. Once again, though, I wish the team had done something more with the possibility of your “hollow” stat escalating until it reaches 99.
I still think that Dark 1 would have been vastly improved by having you start with some reserve of humanity, with every death lowering humanity by 1, and if you get to 0 it’s permadeath or some other horrible consequence. It would make the hollowing process real to the player and make the struggle over harvesting humanity (which is what pvp revolves around) meaningful.
Death in these games has always been a painless and basically comedic learning experience, so I really cannot agree here. The only thing you lose are the things you decided to put at risk in the first place (unspent souls, one-time-use items, emberization) and in any case you always come away with the items you picked up (including soul items) and the skills you learned. You’re supposed to feel rewarded, laughing and energized to give it another go, not to glance with anxiety at your ticking down counter.
A Valley Without Wind 2 is one of the very few long games with irreversible metagame resource loss when you die in action sections – it’s unbearable and made me quit soon enough. I guess you are proposing a loss that can be reversed via farming though. That just sounds like Bloodborne’s vial system which I have yet to hear anybody like.
which would be even more problematic since humanity farming isn’t really viable until late game, even if it’s technically possible as early as the sewers
the system would work better if humanity was an unlimited resource from the start but then it’d just be another thing to dump souls into
I actually really really liked the way dark souls 2 handled hollowing, probably more so than any game in the series. unlike ds1, it actually had tangible in game consequences. unlike demons, it does not immediately present an enormous, unfair penalty. and they way they have your characters appearance gradually degrade into a frazzled skeleton like thing was pretty great. it was the only game in which I motivated to stay human for narrative reasons on top of gameplay.
I tried keeping my human appearance in ds3 until I realized I was on track for some kind of lord of hollows ending and I was just like well fuck it, I kinda look cool this way anyway and if it fits the path I guess I’m going for. this is the first time in the souls series where I feel like I have a decent enough grasp of the lore to feel like the ending I’m moving towards is the result of a series of meaningful choices, and as far as I can tell there isn’t really any weird obscure shit to do to get there. I googled to make sure and I had already completed all the conditions. I just kind of… role played until it hit me. yet at the same time it’s never presented as an explicit choice, either. I think that’s a subtle but important narrative triumph in and of itself.
in fact, probably my favorite thing about this game so far (though some of it might have to do with my build?) is how natural the “role playing” elements are. I don’t mean “role playing game” but like, the action of actually performing a role, which is the whole point of these things, right? the souls game have always been pretty good about that but I guess it’s some combination of me having a higher “literacy” with both the lore and game the system and this game’s design being just slightly friendlier in terms of presenting side quests and ending paths and stuff. I don’t know, in a narrative sense it feels a lot more purposeful and contiguous and whole without sacrificing any of the subtlety and obscurity of the past games. but then, I haven’t quite finished it yet so my opinion might change!
those are some good posts you got there toups. would be a shame if anything were to happen to them
I wouldn’t call interaction with the multiplayer system “farming.” Another advantage of my proposal is that it would attract otherwise solitary gamers who aren’t interested in the technical/skill mastery challenges of “pvp” into the online modes. It would also keep population higher as everyone would always have a real incentive to be onlineing, rather than it being mostly a fun option like it is now (assuming you’re good enough/level enough to beat the game without phantom help).
hey @toups : speaking more about how Dark Souls 3 has the least cynical feel out of all of the games, a lot of people have proposed that this is what Dark Souls was gradually building towards anyway
there’s kind of a myth arc, supposedly, of a flame re-igniting. in dark souls 1 you had no flame, then ash, then embers
This would really only work in an ideal world where Dark’s online wasn’t a dump.
Yeah, I mean, even most MMOs don’t force you to play with actual other people, until the late game. So it’s a real stretch to ask it of game with half-baked netcode, a handful of servers, and underdesigned incentives that result in the total flop of theoretically cool multiplayer concepts like Old Monk and Gravelord Covenant.
True multiplayer game design is a tough problem requiring a very different development process than the implement-secretly-for-18-months-then-shove-out-the-door process that single player games, Souls games very much included, follow. Dark Souls has chosen to dabble in multiplayer and make it an optional plus, and they know their limits here.
The goal is to collect resources so it’s farming. Players’ drive for efficiency turns all kinds of well-intended systems into farming. You can be sure players will find the best spot and then congregate there to collect humanity as fast as possible.
I think the relative failure of DS pvp comes from inevitable area knowledge more than anything, I agree with the fighting system not being able to sustain itself. Heavy procedural generation is a step I wanted to see after DS1 but I guess it would make for a far less interesting and recognizable 1p experience.
all three Souls games ive played i did entirely singleplayer for my first character. I think its good to keep that as a viable option. the PvP scene is basically a grassroots thing that sprang up out of the complementary and semi-incidental MP in Demons Souls, personally i think efforts to cater to PvP-focused players (covenants etc.) while keeping the same core host-based mechanics have been of mixed quality, at best
i really like pvp in the first weeks of a dark souls when i’m way ahead of the curve and i can try to invade in the places where it’s worst to get invaded - irithyll dungeon was great! i also enjoyed ratman summoning in dks2 when it was early enough that lots of the time the people getting summoned didn’t know what the hell was going on
Aaand done, finished slightly under 80 hours. Really liked the last two fights of the game. The last boss was both unexpected and unsurprising once I got the concept behind it.
My only gripe is that I made a quality build to try multiple weapons and I ended sticking to the starting straight sword because it was way more efficient that anything else. There are few arts that are really useful and in the end slapping enemies with the straight sword R1 can stunlock almost anything in the game. I got to riposte the boss of Lothric castle twice in the same fight just by spamming R1 to its face. Which was also the strategy of around 60% of the (few) invaders I got.
By the way: props to that one invader in catacombs that made the Patches’ squat, dropped a dung pie, waved and then proceed to jump down a cliff. Using the world of others as a toilet is a very peculiar use of the Red Eye Orb.
