dks3 at least has a few frames of startup on the parry, thank god.
don’t forget torches found their way into bloodborne and actually seem usable as such! it is a much darker game though.
i am the resident ‘i like dark souls 2’ person here. going to be first in line to say: yes, the area design stinks, the enemies are samey, there’s this long-ass line of knight-like bosses down one of the paths and it’s incredibly boring, everything feels like it subtly missed the point. that is, it feels like a fan game; from some people who really liked what was before and they wanted to build on top of it, but weren’t really overflowing with ideas or concepts.
and that’s interesting! it shows what happens when people with a technical or mechanically focused mindset sit down and figure out how to evolve the game a step further. at that, I think they succeeded! but, as it turns out, while this might be better for the people who really want to sink their teeth into the game, it ends up with far worse feel for those who don’t.
dark souls 2 rather proudly goes the other direction from prior games, overloading you with numbers and data and all kinds of useless information tha’ts of no use to anyone but the most dedicated players.
i will stand by one thing though: it has the best online experience of the franchise period. so if you are down with multiplayer, heck yeah das2 rules. even the limited orbs really aren’t a big deal.
How did we get a fangame/direct-to-DVD game of the first-party studio, though? It also reminds me of the NSMB series — there, we know that came out of an isolated bunch of graduates from an experimental game design class Nintendo ran (this curriculum clearly failed to teach true Nintendo wisdom but rather only a superficial impostor version of it). How was this From team formed and what were the internal politics behind their total isolation from the Souls creators, I wonder?
That doesn’t ring true. That’s just the sanitized official story. I’m imagining this kind of drama:
Miyazaki: “I want to pursue this new werewolf IP.”
Management: “OK, but only if you let another team do Dark Souls. This is our cash cow now and we can’t let it languish.”
Miyazaki: “Dark Souls is my baby and I’m really uneasy about this. But I’ll pay that price.” Miyazaki stews in hatred of DkS2 for its entire development process but grits his teeth and doesn’t get distracted from Bloodborne
In 2014, Miyazaki says: “I know I once said I didn’t want to become an executive because I wanted to focus on creative work, but I’ve changed my mind. I’m your golden goose and I have to the right to be making all the decisions around here. Make me company President because I want to have the power to prevent something like Dark Souls 2 from ever happening again.”
This is all pure conjecture of course, but I’ve been working in corporations long enough to know that there’s always a shitload of drama behind the scenes whenever a flawed product gets put out.
it’s way simpler than that. bamco gave 'em a contract to publish one game with the option of up to three if it did well.
and did well it did.
i believe there are members of sony who express regret about not having faith in demon’s souls, and that’s how we led to them wanting bloodborne to be made.
Man it’s weird how DS2 is the most disjointed of the series when it is the only one with a literal world map you can go look at.
If there were any less half-ideas it would be a failure but that it has so many half-ideas is inspiring. So many!
I still haven’t seen all the Scholar’s Content but I definitely dumped hundreds of hours into 2.
I am stupid are the PS360 versions seperate eco-systems between Vanilla and Scholar? Or did Vanilla update to Scholar and if I just load up my copy it is all different.
I really wanted more oppurtunities to fight those little assassins you fight in the boat and they gave that at least.
Man, I had completely forgotten about that world map. So many weird half-baked things in there that make you go “huh” but are not memorable per se.
In a way DkS2 is a game about forgetting, which is the most dreamlike thing about it. I try to summon the gist of the game in my mind but it’s too much and too slippery, and I only seize onto fragments, different ones every time I think of it.
I mean, I’ve never played a better Souls game than Demon’s Souls, but I think that’s mostly because it’s pretty clear that once Demon’s Souls gained cult status it became “a thing” and was no longer just Miyazaki’s fangirling over medieval Europe mixed with a light sprinkling of Cthulu mythos.
It basically became “more” than that, and as a result became something… well, I can only really describe as trending towards popularity. Dark Souls is immediately more accessible in just about every conceivable way, but it also sacrifices a lot of what made Demon’s Souls so interesting to get there.
Dark Souls 2 had that same alien feeling again, but it was an alien feeling that was created by people who weren’t Miyazaki. And the result is something that is disjointed, largely because, while it was a fan project for them just as much as Demon’s Souls was a fan project for Miyazaki, they had both more constraints by way of expectations and less constraints by way of budget. The result is a lot of ideas that feel unfinished because that’s normally what happens when you have a bunch of people fangirling and creating things all at the same time (which they could do because they had a budget now), without a singular point of focus (which they couldn’t find because there wasn’t a person leading the pack and finding a way to make all the pieces fit).
Same. I can understand being disappointed or finding it lacking in some areas you had fondness for in the other game(s), but the sense of revulsion that people describe, or considering it mediocre is a little too much IMO.
I’m thinking that can only come from overrating the previous games so much that nothing can ever touch that idealized image.
It’s my second favorite after Demon’s Souls precisely because of how much it experiments. Not all of said experiments are successful (some are outright failures), but you definitely can’t say that they were “playing it safe” when they were designing the game. “Playing it safe” is how I’d describe DS 1, 3, and Bloodborne, even if they’re still great experiences.
I think there is a very interesting lesson here about the degree to which some people do and don’t perceive this overall bustedness and how much it gets in the way for them
(I’m in the “it’s not even close to being on the same level as the others but my individual memories of it are quite strong” camp)
i had virtually the opposite experience of HOBO’s, i played 2 a bunch this weekend and kept thinking why was i so hard on this game??
When it came out i had just beaten 1 for the first time (and sampled the first few levels of Demon’s) and i was so immersed in that game’s systems and flow that 2’s felt entirely lacking. i still played 100+ hours of it in the first year, though, so obviously there was always something there. It has aged very well for me, and i think it helps that it’s now one contrasting part of a longer series, instead of the newest entry with the weight of expectations upon it.
i also, uhh, was partly incentivized to re-evaluate it because i was bored of the meta-discussion around it always being “why is this so much bad than other souls???” so i’m sorta dismayed at how immediately the topic reverted back to that mean
It’s boring when you put it that way but that’s not quite fair to the discussion here which has actually been quite interesting in its approach to evaluating that perceived inferiority! Like, I don’t think anyone is suggesting that’s all there is to it. It’s far from implying that we can’t appreciate B-games or anything like that.
Yes, look at Hobo’s post, everything from the colour palette to the enemies that turn up in the hub is constantly vaguely off-putting in a way that the other titles concretely aren’t. That’s why I said this:
I’ve always liked how sb often resolutely refuses to be bothered by this stuff but to some degree I think that’s just a critical mass of people who don’t really perceive it as being that problematic, which has always been a significant factor in some of the most interesting discussions we have. I think the people who do experience the mild revulsion are on the hook to make that response less boring!
Yeah i was like that too, and now i’m trying to make a case against my own previous stance.
like what mauve said here was nice and i agree with it*:
but i think the framing of 2 as “like a fan game,” like calling the designers the “B-team,” is still denigrating in a way that i’m increasingly edgy about. It was designed by a different team! Maybe i am just more interested in exploring their philosophy and take on the formula on its own than constantly comparing it to the rest of the series, like haven’t we done that enough? i think the notion that the best one of these games can aspire to is an imitation of what came before is how we got a highly playable, but simultaneously tired old wankfest like 3.