I would say ‘underwhelm’ is one of the few things this game does not do. it is maybe what I’d call structurally uninspiring. it’s mechanics and lore and such are just dark souls 4, it’s got copy paste enemies and assets everywhere, it shoehorns botw into the formula for extra content and guaranteed positive reviews, etc. it’s very unbalanced. some of the nitty gritty systems don’t make sense to me, as I’ve complained about. but it’s also really full of stuff, and a lot of that stuff is great. some of the reveals where all of a sudden you stumble into giant areas you had no idea existed are among the best things from has ever done. stormveil and the capital are knockout demon’s souls levels. it’s full of hyper dumb shit that is extremely satisfying, like the lava gothic mansion and the batshit insane secret way you access a chunk of it, or the giant ant tunnels, the sniper lobsters, teleport treasure chests, whatever the fuck the radahn festival is, the troll as fuck hero graves. just lots of stuff. the ash of war + freely changeable infusions is a great system for weapon experimentation. being able to just warp out of any shit you don’t want to deal with to go do something else really keeps you playing. sometimes the game is gorgeous in a way I really wasn’t expecting given how blase the prerelease stuff seemed to me. I don’t know, this game is a lot of things.
I do cause I just want to wear the best looking one
Is it “easy” to recognize which dungeons are “filler dungeons”?
Is my understanding correct, in that they are a sort of randomly generated dungeons (like Chalice), with some care added by the developers?
the filler dungeons are like the mines and catacombs other short indoor locations with boss fog doors
basically the places that you get to with a stonesword key or by elevator
I’m feeling the same degree of under and overwhelming that others are feeling. I just can’t quite click with its rhythm and I think its because I play soulsbornes in a really methodical and deliberate manner. So stuff like the small dungeons and the likes of the stormveil castle feed into that mentality whereas everything in the open world kinda put me in assassins creed mode where I just passively explore and clear encampments. I still have like 90% of the game left so I’m hoping I can reconcile both instead of them both feeling artificially united.
I’m still loving it 40 hours in. So far I feel like my playtime has been about 70% open world, 20% real Souls dungeon and 10% filler dungeon, so the repetition has not been that much of a problem. You even do find bits of genius in filler dungeons.
I think the bigger issue with the copy & paste dungeon is that finding them is a reward for exploration, and they are disappointing as such. Also this game is maybe the first big AAA open world game with a memorable map… ever, which makes the less memorable catacombs all the more contrasting.
I’m getting weird oblivion throwbacks from all the catacomb entrances that are normal doors artificially inserted into natural cliffsides and surfaces.
i had like thirty hours of the same feeling i got from playing 1-1 of demon’s souls in march 2009 but then the fatigue set in
I love the filler dungeons the same way I love the Chalice Dungeons from Bloodborne. Just whack on some custom music and have a blast.
I’m aware the isn’t the intended way of play but your choice of music can decrease or increase the tension as desired. A++ gaming
yeah for the record i am saying “filler dungeon” as the current SB colloquialism but i also love chalice dungeons and i love the oblivion-style caves
yeah, game is phenomenal, nedge is right on the money, it basically has no comparison, it just structurally overshoots in a couple ways if anything. it is like 60 hours minimum to do a satisfying amount of the content and by that point it’s pretty challenging for it to carry momentum, either narratively or mechanically
the hero’s grave catacombs are hilarious so you should at least check out those, they have a fancier entrance with a circular elevator room rather than just a stairway
mines are unfortunately kind of essential when you need upgrade materials; they’re also the only ones indicated on the map before you go there (small black mark with a reddish glow)
i like in the later game when some of the mines are invaded by erdtree roots, though
now that I’m well past it, I do think it’s fair to say that they didn’t do a great job of writing the overarching plot (“foreshadowing” is a good word for what it’s missing, Cf Broco) outside of Liurnia specifically, which ties its various little mysteries together quite nicely. the whole situation with Radagon and the Loux family and the ring itself is barely there in the end, and the Milicent questline is almost a joke, that seems to exist purely to scaffold a lot of the high level optional content, but unlike with Ranni it’s almost more likely that you’d find all of that on its own than with Milicent’s help. Fia is a little better, her thing worked for me, but it also drew attention to how the Roundtable Hold eventually stops advancing any NPCs’ stories like halfway through the game and replaces them with nothing.
I don’t even know that I would’ve wanted them to cut anything, it’s just a very intense game to try to stretch out this long
actually it’s funnier than this, in hindsight almost every tertiary late game area that I arrived at and then immediately decided “idk if I want to do this” turned out to be Milicent related
I still admire the impulse to make this all as optional and oblique as it is! Just seems like fatigue is going to be a huge factor in whether you miss half these triggers
i don’t even know what’s happening in this game, as per usual. the game might as well not have a story to me.
i actually kinda hate the opaqueness of from games’ stories as much as i respect the concept. i just…have no idea who anyone is or why i should care or what they’re doing, and when i see people talking about these characters as if they have, uh, motivations or anything i am completely baffled. my entire experience of Dark Souls was “eerie NPCs with 8 lines tell me things i don’t understand and then die” which is honestly fine but it makes me feel like a huge idiot when people start talking about that game having incredible lore.
maybe all the story happens after you beat ornstein and smough which i never did
also i’ve played 55 hours and still haven’t met like 50% of the people everyone has mentioned
Yeah FROM lore feels to me, at best, like those Dragon Quests NPCs you realise are related and/or waiting for each other in the wrong place and you’re helpless to assist.
i’ve played most of these games for hundreds of hours each and every so often i skim one of those ‘lore’ videos and honestly wonder where the fuck they got all of this stuff from. maybe i should start reading the flavour text for every single item or something
i do this and i still don’t know what the fuck is going on
my first time playing bloodborne it began to depress me how little story i’d encountered; i believe i aggroed eileen (though her quest is quite obscure anyway), alfred doesn’t really do anything until a late game optional event i didn’t reach, i missed a bunch of townsfolk windows, probably sent the ones i did speak to to iosefka, missed the beast guy (i was right there, but the game’s just so gosh darn dark) and… based on all the lore hints i began to feel like my only answers lay in byrgenwerth, but when i got there my first instinct was to attack master willem, who as it turns out doesn’t say anything anyway, but it had me feeling like i’d screwed up my only opportunity to make any intelligent progress because of my primal gamer impulses. as if the game had revealed something innately ugly and violent about me.