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To be played in the absence of anything more interesting
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Waiting for the tram I just saw a guy wearing a Dark Souls 3 sweater. It said You Died on the back. It looked pretty cool.
That is all
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Just gon’ drop in and confirm Miyazaki-san confirmed this (more or less and through a translator but yeah) to me in person backstage at an E3.
He also said the other rando hollows in the world were players who’d stopped playing, symbolically.
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i always took the player giving up/deleting their character as that character “hollowing”
i like how a lot of the elements of this series can be read in a meta way, yet From took a light enough touch that it’s not MGS2 in your face about them
i think there’s even an interesting meta reading buried in 3’s story, though i still haven’t actually finished it yet so i don’t wanna get into it until i have the full picture
i have been playing 3 a bunch lately, in an effort to finally finish it, and i… think i like it well enough but uh, it’s definitely my least favorite in the series. again, wanna finish it first but my main takeaway is that it is the game that people who only tried Dark Souls and gave up in frustration think the whole series is like. Like, it’s difficult in ways that the first game emphatically is not. Some of this can be blamed on trying to add more Bloodborne-like enemies and play style, and some of it’s just because it’s the 5th game in the series in 7 years and they were squeezing blood from a stone, mechanics-wise
Having played DS1, 2 and 3 a bit, I agree that it’s probably the most difficult in the series. At the same time, while it neither took as many risks as Dark Souls 2 nor does it have the strength of encounters of Dark Souls 1, I think Dark Souls 3 is the most creative with regards to its combat and gives room for more strategy in play than DS1 and 2, mostly by means of an extremely well-balanced game, though this also necessitates a higher floor (and relatively speaking, a lower ceiling as well). It is competent and coherent in a way none of the other games really are, to such a degree that I’d almost call it mathematical if it wasn’t for the fact that so many of the game’s systems are predicated on feeling out controls and finessing one’s way through encounters with sometimes less-than-obvious timings, particularly for larger bosses (as is the case with basically all large bosses in all From Software games).
I find the game fascinating, and of course it also happens to have my favorite weapon in any of the games, thus that heightened floor only really served to motivate me to practice with it, and ending with some extraordinarily satisfying encounters (and on the other end, some extraordinarily frustrating ones as well).
Because the creator told me it was. 
I’m not just “into the lore”, I literally worked on two of the games and exchanged e-mails with FromSoft from Namco about this shit all the time. I don’t often have point-by-point breakdowns because honestly it never comes up, it’s just like “Hey, is that guy in the Watchtower actually Ornstein?” and I get back “Yes, but has had his lightning magic stripped away now that Gwyn has lost his lord soul”.
And I then I get told this is 100% wrong! And at this point I’m just pretty sure the community-accepted lore has drifted away from the company’s lore and they’re just like “Eh, sure, whatever.”
But okay, I’ll edit in the overarching concept here and you guys can either think I’m totally full of shit or not: The order is Dark 1 -> Dark 2/Demon’s/BB1/BB2/King’s Field 1/2/3/4/etc. -> Dark 3 plot wise; the middle parts are in any order, essentially, and they’re all in the same “universe” in that Forgotten Realms is still technically a setting in D&D.
Bloodborne was the Lovecraft “Module” of the 'Souls D&D Ruleset. Think of the games as individual campaigns; they’re related and share rules but are still their own stories.
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I also sat with Vaati for like 4 hours and went over this stuff with him for like an entire day. >:(
what dark souls has nothing to do with king’s field fromsoft has never said anything about that you are an internet liar
'kay I must be imagining things oh hold on you guys ever beat dark souls 2 remember that weird kiln throne thing hey on an entirely unrelated note check out the PSP KF rereleases
Hey you guys remember Darklurker?
Hey remember how Seathe is weirdly MIA in Dark Souls 2?
That’s because Seathe IS the Darklurker.
When you meet him in KF2, guess what his name is there?
Seathe.
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Heh. For the longest time, the Wikis made no mention of this despite it being really visibly obvious
…and the shared name thing was supposed to kinda be the big reveal (which is why he’s never actually called Seathe in DS2, his name has been forgotten by then) and that ties into what’s being mined up at Brightstone Cove and the fact that you can visit the corpse of an Eternal Dragon by looking at the soul under the dead Freya corpse and siiiigh Okay.
I mean they got this far.
Here.
Seathe was Trying to be Reborn in a New Body. That’s kind of his thing, right? Born deformed, wants to be immortal/whole again?
Okay, you know how in Dark Souls II, the implication is that Vendrick stole the secret of Soul Transferral (and thus immortality) from the Giants? Seathe wanted to use that to transfer his soul into the body of an Immortal Dragon (possibly actually the one he killed originally), but the bodies would reject him so he had to modify it and experiment.
All the cut up Giant corpses, the “successful” giants implanted into the walls of the castle activated by letting loose souls near them and bringing them to life, all of it was Seathe’s attempt to be able to learn the secret of soul transferral, but he was never able to figure it out.
Having exhausted Arcane, Light, and Crystal magic to keep himself immortal, Seathe turns to the Abyss, as have many others. Others you can actually find in the Abyss in Dark Souls 2. And who bear a striking resemblance to protagonists and antagonists from the King’s Field(s), Dark Souls, and Demon’s Souls games. That’s where the real immortals end up.
So he got his new body, but was stuck in the Abyss. King’s Field 2’s entire plot revolves around an ancient Dragon god trying to escape from a dark dimension, which you must access using a magic throne and defeat.
There ya go.
Is it all tied together with brilliant, diamond precision? No, intentionally.
Is it related? For fuck’s sake, yes, it is, and there’s like a giant litany of evidence for this. I’m really baffled by people who insist this isn’t true because like I’m not sure what else ya need.
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it’s just a boring reading imo and I’m not that interested in all the painstakingly mapped lore
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They even hint at Seath’s eventual embrace of the Abyss in the comic when he makes a point of rejecting it in favor of his (not-yet-destroyed) crystal magic.
Apparently there was also another comic.
it’s just a boring reading imo and I’m not that interested in all the painstakingly mapped lore
Okay, but “I don’t care about the plot” is definitely a you thing in regards to these games. Not a general thing.
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I care about the plot, just not the canonical, exhaustively footnoted one
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… I think my statement still stands, if Vaati’s sub count is any indication.
what’s bb2
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this is … a really cool way to think about it actually, and it’s neat to know there is some deliberate connection between games, but i think letting the community work out their own fragmented version of the Soulsbornefield universe is always going to be more interesting than a neatly arranged canon version of the story
edit: yeah what Felix said
it’s just a boring reading imo and I’m not that interested in all the painstakingly mapped lore
Slightly less flippant answer to my other one: This really is going to depend on whether or not you find intricate pathing of fictional lore to be something inherently interesting to know.
You’ve seen people posting 45-minute breakdowns of Magneto’s power level vs. Batman or whatever pointless thing? That. That scratches an itch for some people, just, inherently.
And not others, at all, who find it pointless and tedious. It’s a thing.
And google tells me this hasn’t been announced WELP
Oh Amazon leaked it.
It’s Bloodborne 2.
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oh, of course. oomf
you know, sometimes the stuff fans come up with on limited information ends up being way more interesting than the real story.
i’m kinda sad there’s gonna be more bloodbore, what’s out there is all we really needed, the DLC wrapped up all the lose ends nicely.
i mean it’s gonna be cool to play i’m sure but… sigh.
forgive my snark i’m suffering from a bit of LORE fatigue in all areas of media
(EDIT: i didn’t mean for that to be a reply to DJ specifically)
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