it is much too early to judge but the first 40 minutes are deeply bland
it’s less of a hilarious technical wreck than dks2 but it’s no bloodborne I don’t think
also I recall the mouse wheel bindings being less silly in earlier installments?
looks like it’s not gonna run on my computer. bummed. i guess i’ll play it at some point down the road
whelp, my controller doesn’t work. the camera just spins endlessly. the internet, near as I can tell, has concluded that there is no reliable fix for this. guess I’ll check back in a week to see if someone can get it working, because we all know From and friends aren’t going to do anything.
you pirated the game and need to move the directory before it’ll work
no I actually bought it 
and if you move a steam game out of the steam folder don’t you have to do a bunch of stupid shit to make it work
yeah, I actually thought that was a bug with the crack that was circulating, nevermind
it’s actually pretty good after firelink, it was just that tutorial level that was extra boring. cleared the second boss, that’s enough for this evening. I’m not finding it quite as painfully linear as reviewers mentioned though it definitely seems like I’ve covered all the ground available to me so far.
i hear parries are not instant in the release version (whereas they were in beta)
i take back all the complaining i did about that.
thinking about “non-linearity” in the first dark souls, the only two real instances of that were a) darkroot being a sort of hub unto itself that you never quite had to progress through at any given time, which also did a great job of feeling larger than it was, and b) the catacombs and NLR being accessible earlier on than you’d realistically want to go there anyway (save for detours to get the estoc and/or gravelord sword).
both of those were pretty well-used, granted.
it also had some really inspired hidden late-game stuff (ash lake, gwyndolin, painted world) which no other game in the series has really risen to the level of.
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turns out the right analog stick on my controller is just broken. what fortuitous timing
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I like how short the intro section is. If it’d had a perfunctory “the real X starts here” bit I’d roll my eyes. Instead it’s just like, hey bud back stabs are back, here’s a crystal monster maybe that’ll be important later. Then a short boss that gets possessed (?) and “firelink shrine.” Raise questions, get me to the leveling NPC, cool.
I was checking out DS2 before this but like hell I’m touching that again. Every enemy rotates at my exact angle all the time regardless of rolling or running.
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The memory leak boss just before the title screen is really difficult, can’t get past it. :<
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I really want to play this, but I’m not convinced I won’t burn out quickly on it. I never did beat Dark Souls 2. When there aren’t large changes between games in a series, I get significantly less interested in it.
everyone who is mentioning dks2 rather than bloodborne as their most recent impression of these games would be 100% better served to play bloodborne before this
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Bloodborne is $400 away from me
I skipped DkS2 in 2014, played Bloodborne last year. I bought DkS2 CE on the cheap recently because Austin Walker recommended it (a man who thinks 2 is the better KOTOR) and it came with a map we could send to Gorblax. It’s missing all of the Monster Hunter influences.
a PS4 is a better value than a current GPU!
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On replaying the early game and understanding the structure better, I like the map design even more. The central Old Wolf of Farron tower in the swamp is truly inspired. It provides a vantage point for orienting yourself around the swamp and a connection with the High Wall area. It also provides a late realization about how troll the winged demons were not to simply cross the broken part and instead go all the way out to Undead Settlement.
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should probably spoiler that, I don’t think anyone’s as far as you are
Ok, I spoilertexted a few words that may have been intended to be a surprise, but I’d just like to err on the side of nonspoilertext to avoid what happened on the Witness thread where 90% of the discussion was spoilertext.