Still, it’s not like they could reuse the curse gag. We need new and delicious torments for them to hit.
Bloodborne’s bag men were pretty good
ds3 is so good it made me go back and start playing ds2, which i had given up on after finding it excruciatingly difficult. planning on finishing sotfs and moving onto 3 again soon.
earthen peak is kind of brutal. black gulch is pretty tough too. the gutter seems hard and unfair but is actually largely trivial if you light the torches, which is great! i’m still salty that i lost 23k souls after getting cocky in unfamiliar territory
Has anyone lately appreciated how good the DrkS3 wiki is
5 Likes
First DLC is coming out this evening 9PM PDT (they moved up the release date one day). Reviews are good, as expected.
I started a new character this weekend and ran through the game up to Princes boss door. Re-impressions:
- A funny thing in general about this game is that as I’m playing it, I enjoy and respect it a lot, but then when I think back on it in retrospect and assess it, it loses its luster because I can’t come up with any dramatic moments or flashes of creativity or in general any story to tell about my experience. It’s like better in practice than in theory. It’s the converse of Demon’s/DkS1, which have heights of high-concept drama but where like a good half of the actual play experience consists of lulls of backtracking boredom and poor-enemy-design frustration. There does exist a synthesis of these strengths – Bloodborne – and yet, in some aspects DkS3 surpasses Bloodborne.
- It was a mistake to bring back so many memorable elements of DkS1 but in every instance without the quality that made them memorable in the first place. There’s a brief frisson of terror when the game brings back some of the brutalizing elements of DkS1 like curse frogs, the black knight archer gauntlet, and the O&S boss room, but that curdles into a sense of hollowness when you realize this game made them “balanced”/“fair”. Balance is fine in a vacuum, but it shouldn’t have tried to make things fair which were defined by their unfairness.
- I really admired the early game areas, which I think are the most intricate, winding, multi-path level designs not only in this game, but in the entire Souls series – I discovered new shortcuts and side goals and ways of traversing Wall and Settlement on this playthrough, even though this is my third time through them. (I loved the suddenly dark/quiet room behind the dragon flames with its early surprise.) Also, the pacing is so tight, everything is so intuitive and every enemy has their own surprise move.
- I mentioned before the color palette is muted and sober in DkS3, and I’m realizing another component of that is the lighting design. DkS1 had pretty janky lighting design, in particular with a weird small-radius glow nonsensically emanating from the player at all times. That lends DkS1 a videogamey clashy look. Whereas Bloodborne has this hyperreal dreamlike lighting. DkS3 is more in tune with Western tastes in that it actually goes for “realistic”. That leads me to DkS3’s biggest achievement…
- DkS3 is the only Souls game “kingdom” that feels worthy of the name. It’s not an agglomeration of levels but a unified landscape that makes sense as a “real” place that you can orient yourself in. From High Wall you can see the two-bridged towers of Lothric Castle on one side, and the great bridge leading to Undead Settlement on the other, with Road of Sacrifice underneath and the Cathedral over to the right. Across the mountains in Boreal Valley you can see Aldritch’s lair behind the town, and Archdragon Peak rising above the clouds. The game is remarkably consistent in showing the rest of the landscape at the appropriate distances and angles in the skybox from at least one vantage point in every area. Alcoves clearly designed as observation spots include the entry into High Wall, the boss room of High Wall, the area behind the giant-guarded double doors in Cathedral, the alcove after beating Pontiff, etc. Probably for technical reasons, the rest of the series provides much fewer of this kind of sweeping observation point.
- Skill Arts still seem a bit silly. Most of them are way too situational. I ended up adopting Great Club in this playthrough in part because its Art is a straight-up ~30-second ~20% damage buff on all attacks, but that also feels kind of dumb. There’s a good idea here, but this game hasn’t delivered on it yet.
We’ll see how the DLC changes my assessment. (It usually has, in this series.)
2 Likes
Wait, why is O&S’s room unfair
That’s just a consequence of how Dark’s landscape is laid out, imo, which is a sort of staggeringly tiered stack, because the game still make a lot of surprising attempts to cross-reference itself in unlikely locations people will miss (such as this particular view from one spot in the burg), often at the risk of looking ugly and cartoonishly simplistic. A lot of Dark takes place at midterranean and subterranean levels, whereas Dark 3’s landscape is structured like a progressively lowering and wavering surface-level slope, so it’s only natural that you’d see more major landmarks in the latter as you move along. You really only get a sense of sustained terranean dislocation while you’re in the swamp, although even then as you light the beacons you’re provided with several cutscenes showing the nearby great bridge.
Dark 2… not sure there. Almost everything feels disconnected. The vista you can see from Majula seems to suggest a landmark-based approach that might’ve been lost as the game’s developmental cycle went along.
4 Likes
[quote=“diplo, post:735, topic:1250, full:true”]
Wait, why is O&S’s room unfair[/quote]
I was thinking more of the other two cases when I said “unfair”, but it’s definitely a ridiculous difficulty spike. I also believe most players arrive for the first time at O&S with a poorer weapon than they were designed for – in particular, it’s a trap to use the Giant blacksmith right outside of their door because they resist lightning.
A lot of Dark takes place at midterranean and subterranean levels, whereas Dark 3’s landscape is structured like a progressively lowering and wavering surface-level slope, so it’s only natural that you’d see more major landmarks in the latter as you move along.[/quote]
Yeah. I’m saying DkS1’s structure was informed by technical constraints. Draw distance is a fundamental constraint on level design and an experienced team like From would’ve taken it into account as they were mapping the world on paper. On the other side, the incredibly dense micro-details of Bloodborne and the sweeping vistas of DkS3 are different ways of letting the new capabilities of the PS4 generation define game design ambitions.
but he can make you quelaag’s furysword (which one of them also resists)!
Certainly by 360 days LOD systems were advanced enough to make distant landscapes look real good. Even in PS2 days they made do with 2D billboards way out in the distance. Polygons don’t care how big and far you make them unless you’re on the PS1.
I don’t think this was technically bound at all; like a lot of graphics tech (reflections, anti-aliasing, etc) we’ve had techniques for decades but they remain relatively expensive because they scale with fidelity.
2 Likes
I don’t know how much of it is engine constraints vs real hardware constraints vs workflow constraints, but DkS1’s framerate chugged in angles where you could see too much in Blighttown and New Londo, for instance. Though obviously they were able to make the Anor Londo vista work fine. I’m not saying that the PS3 generation couldn’t do vistas as a hard constraint – as a rule, modern consoles don’t have any hard constraints anymore – more that LOD approaches exist in a tough trade-off space that likely make would it a ton of work and quite a few compromises to achieve scenes like in DkS3. With more powerful hardware, the pressure is eased.
This is more basic. Their culling was underdeveloped and they just couldn’t handle that many draw calls. Far distance vistas are a fraction of the resources of the gameplay space vistas, especially if they don’t have sophisticated solutions for NPC LoDs. I had a chance to talk to an engine programmer (a westerner who had since returned) who worked at From from Armored Core: For Answer through Dark Souls based on his love for King’s Field. After I slapped him around for Blight Town, he explained: eh, culling, they didn’t think it was important enough to fix. Really!
4 Likes
Oh. I thought you were talking about the room itself.
it’s especially notable because when you play dark souls at 1080p anor londo’s vistas look rather crude. there’s actually a mod for it. the polygonal geometry is generally pretty basic. you can really tell how generally basic the geometry is in dks1 if you play 3 and 1 back to back
can’t recall dks1 taking this approach, but in dks2 and 3, LoD NPCs just move at fractional FPS until they are closer, particularly if there are a lot of them
1 Like
speaking of,
these 2D backdrop elements are immediately detectable in VR (and probably with glasses 3D), even when you’re looking at it way below the game’s intended rez
1 Like
very truman show ;_;
the only solution, ;
step through the skybox door
craft your own vidcons
3 Likes
oh, I almost forgot
don’t forget to stab god in his shriveled black heart on the way out
The separate models used for the distant structures you can see from the edge of the destroyed bridge in Dark 3 are pretty rudimentary too tbh (see also: the screenshot in the first post for the Bloodborne thread), and the foliage is juuuuuuust a slight step above Dark’s, if that. I get the sense that From will try to show what they can to express the contiguousness of a region, limitations (or the inadequacies of the artists) be damned, and that Dark 3 is just a different sort of world view relative to Dark. I see the full embrace of new technological capabilities much more present in Bloodborne which tries to overwhelm you with sheer gothic/mannerist detail along every corridor.
3 Likes
So, nobody else played the DLC yet? It’s pretty dang solid. I know Painted World came in for a lot of praise around here and this is a decidedly superior version of it. This is full of DkS1 references once again, but this time actually tops the source material in lots of ways.
The whole area is an intricate, vertical spiral with lots of side paths and shortcuts, there’s not been another Souls level quite like this one. It shows they haven’t yet mined out their level structure creativity. And without spoiling anything, I love all the bait-and-switch on the final boss intro/enrage cutscenes. It repeatedly teases that the fight is going to be one thing, but no. Seems tough as nails too, I’m just starting to learn it (mainly by doing about ~10 coops, only one of which ended in success) but I think soloing it is going to have a different feel. Not quite as tough as Orphan or Camera King, probably, but up there.
good to hear! I’ll get around to it; my last save is just sitting in front of camera king, the same way my bloodborne save is sitting in front of orphan…
1 Like