they’ve been strongly hinting at doing an armored core title for PSVR
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What DS3 lacks in new ideas it does make up for with rather strong level and area design. I wouldn’t put it as the pinnacle of the series but it is back in line with the original and Demon’s after DS2 sorta didn’t handle that aspect all that well.
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it probably makes a difference that i consider consoles to be sort of an unjustifiable money sink so i’ve never touched demon’s or bb - but dang ds3 is real taut so far. ds2 is a hateful, miserable game (that’s still pretty good somehow), but ds3 is gentler and friendlier and atmospheric
[quote=“meauxdal, post:709, topic:1250, full:true”]
it probably makes a difference that i consider consoles to be sort of an unjustifiable money sink so i’ve never touched demon’s or bb[/quote]
Well, from my point of view, every console has only like 3-4 games that truly justify its existence. Bloodborne is one of those so it makes the PS4 purchase worth.
Demon’s at this point I wouldn’t call mandatory though. 5201 had a real bad time with it and he was kind of right to honestly. It’s redundant in the same way that DS3 is, except that it’s much much less polished.
I can’t disagree more. I think DeS and DkS1 are invaluable companion pieces.
What it did with the dragonhood idea was pretty neat.
He also didn’t figure out you could lock on until like twenty hours in. So.
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Can this be the thread where I finally express that people being moved by the encounter with Astraea baffles me about as much as people being moved by Aeris dying
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Actually, people being moved by Aeris dying makes much, much, much more sense to me, because you at least have prior involvement with Aeris. Astraea is an interesting narrative moment that brutally and more than anything else in the game shows what a bad person you are (excepting the “Step on the Maiden in Black’s Head” ending), but there is no prior emotional connection to her character or her dynamic with Garl. It’s all constrained to a bit of Nexus text and a cutscene. I just don’t get how it stands as an intensely emotional moment for people. Instead, I think it demonstrates a willingness of the designers to treat bosses not all as angry threats. The variation is the value.
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That is another reason to play Demon’s Souls, though. It represents a moment before From Software’s bosses became generally codified in temperament and demands as the designers seemingly became increasingly confident in the mechanics. You can criticize Demon’s’ bosses as gimmicky, but that is in fact their strength – that they are not reducible to “ok big sword thing again but this time roll at moment [x] instead of moment [y]” (Bloodborne, I think, can get away with its bosses’ aggressive tendencies and less topographically textured settings because of the mechanical reinventions and reinvigorations), and that within their variations they can reinforce the narrative thread of your avatar’s power-lusting behavior (Phalanx, for example, is essentially harmless). The worst bosses actually tend to be the ones that you could imagine in a Dark Souls game, like the Penetrator or Dirty Colossus.
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I think it had more to do with what was said to the player rather than the emotional connection to Astraea or Garl. It was a moment of perspective in a game that’s constantly pushing you forward as “granting” something to all these enemies (freedom from their pain and suffering as monsters, maybe), to maybe just being an invader in a world that actually doesn’t have a lot of conflict in it anymore prior to your entrance into it.
Made me think about the game world as more of a purgatory rather than a hell and forced more involvement with the world than I had prior to the encounter.
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The problem with DkS3 is that only, like, a third of it can stand on its own two feet as a piece. It smells like the product of some very tired and bored and talented folks.
Everything on the way to and having to do with Aldrich works really well. most of Undead Settlement and Road of sacrifices, Cathedral, Irithyll, sure. It’s all well designed and all coherent. But it feels like that’s the only chunk of Lothric that had dev time lended to it. Untended graves is a neat idea with precious little spine. Profaned capital is there being spooky for no apparent reason and its a boring stage to boot. Prince Lothric is just kind of there cos he has to be, he even whines about it. The endings are cool in context, especially linking the fire, though that one specifically doesn’t make any impact at all if you haven’t played the first couple games. There are a few other neatly considered details. Literally everything else is either pandering or Lost-style directionless open-ended plotting. Even if irthyll dungeon is p cool as a latria reference it’s too late. DkS3 leans on its pedigree too much to stand up as a thing unto itself. It expects reverence and reference to substitute for substance. There are simply too many needlessly empty gestures in this game, just begging for a mountain of lore videos to do the work so that the scenario planners don’t have to.
It’s too bad bc the front third of the game is so, so well designed and the combat is as good as it could be. I really hope the DLC has some love put into it.
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yeah, like talbain said, Astraea was less about Astraea and more about upending the player’s view of just what they were doing down there.
i mean if you stop to think about it, she’s just as much part of the problem as anything else, but there’s a reason people near the end of the game note how hungry for souls you are
i was actually watching a jp lp earlier this year and the player just completely did not care about astraea at all as he had been essentially playing as a piece of selfish garbage, which was kind of amusing
i’d still rather replay demon’s souls than dark souls, since i enjoy dark souls up until the end of anor londo and then i stop caring about the rest of the game so i usually stop there. i’ll still stand by ds2 being the best pvp game of the series though and nobody can change my mind
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I can understand seeing the encounter with Astraea as an interesting narrative twist, as I stated above. What I’m still confused about is why anyone treats it as legendary moment of Prepare to Cry. Like, how on earth is it invoking that strong of an emotional response. EDIT: This is probably an unanswerable question, so Whatever~~~~
It has a particularly explicit form of a gender-roled, Don Quixote ideal of knighthood, which it then violates. I think your comparison to Aeris is on point.
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this thread is now about stuff i don’t know about yet so i guess i’ll check back out until i beat it
Playing DS3 and liking it altho it feels a little bland - i haven’t noticed that many interesting new enemy types aside from the crocodile things and the water spiders and even both of those seem closer to snuck-in Bloodborne aesthetix than anything else. Lore stuff feels a lot thinner w/ exception of the Anri / Aldrich parts which had some good weird moments in them. Biggest change to me feels like the bonfire placement being pushed closer to a pure pacing mechanism than these isolated outposts used as local hub points, it removes a lot of tension with how regular and close they are but I do enjoy how it puts things closer to Demons Souls ish arcade runs than perpetual cautious slog. The level design is very good in general I think. Favourite bits were clambering up the outside of the cathedral and thru the swamp.
I do enjoy the feeling that the game world is kind of older and more subtle than in previous games. Like DS1 had these isolated warlord types spread out over a landscape of occasional ruined human structures. DS2 was more insistent about presenting itself as some kind of feudal kingdom, you had the royal family and all their retainers and cronies hunkering down in their different manses and bickering with each other as they took whatever they could get but they were still in nominal relationships with some form of social structure. In DS3 all the flame stuff seems to have settled down into a regular, ritualised ceremonial function, a lot of the buildings and designs seem far more ornate and elaborate, the structure seems more settled, more business as usual in the churches and the prisons, a suggestion that even the giant lord guys are just being held legally accountable or whatever for not playing their settled role in the social contract, and that the lapse itself was more the result of apathy or distraction than anything especially apocalyptic. I haven’t finished (just reached the library thing) so this is just spitballing but I do like the sense of a building matter-of-fact accommodation with these weird death ceremonies. Maybe that was why I liked stumbling completely by accident into the ending of the Anri arc, too.
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ds3 is real good. i’m actually now playing all three ds games now, alternating when i get bored or frustrated with a section. they all have their charms, but ds2:sotfs is the most dastardly and brutal by far. some of the design decisions and layouts are just absurdly punishing and frustrating (even as early as fotfg) in a way that ds holds off on putting you through until much later (fuck you, crystal cave). seriously, that battlement by the cardinal tower bonfire with the destructible wall and bomb thrower is so infuriatingly obnoxious that i almost quit the game again (last time i quit at a boss somewhere closer to the midgame). it’s not hard necessarily, but it’s sadistic. ds3, by contrast, seems much more at peace with itself. it doesn’t feel like its trying to prove anything to you, or demonstrate its willingness to punish you just for its own amusement.
really love all the changes in sotfs, though. the recontextualizations are consistently surprising and refreshing.
but dang, these are the only (recent) singleplayer games i really care about anymore.
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I’m still trying to work out my thoughts on DS3. I think my biggest problem with it might be that I went from a serious replay of DS2 to BB to DS3 in about 3 months with no interruption. I’m pretty confident I like BB more than DS3, but I think I was overly harsh on DS3 going into it. I had a lot of fun with the latter areas.
The routinzation of shortcuts and regularity of bonfires changes the rhythm of the game in a way that I’m less thrilled about.
I also beat the game without expecting to. Somehow I thought that must have been a penultimate boss. Granted, I had a summon with me, but I found it a little anticlimactic.
Will probably start another run after the DLC is out. Going back to BB again for now.
Dark3’s final boss should’ve been Entropy, and it should’ve been undefeatable.
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Yeah, if there’s one thing that’s been gradually lost in between Demon’s and DkS3, it’s the willingness to go ahead and ship ridiculous high-concept ideas, player satisfaction be damned.
(My pet example is that getting cursed in DkS3 is a pathetic shadow of how anguish-inducing it was in DkS1.)
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