Tonight, I was helping another player in the swamp area. Eventually, the host died and I went on to help someone else. Soon, the person I had been assisting previously invaded. I ended up finishing off the invader with a drop attack. It felt kind of like a minor betrayal. I guess I somehow think of invaders and cooperators as different categories that don’t overlap much.
I opened the way to that optional boss but didn’t try fighting it due to all the warning messages on the ground indicating how difficult the fight is. However, in yet another cooperative session, the host ran straight to that fight so I got to experience it. I don’t think it’s something I will bother with in my game. One tail swipe killed us both after a minute or so.
I definitely got a bit of fatigue doing that stairway with the fat wispy face guys over and over. Then I realised you can just run past them without much trouble and there’s a bonfire pretty easily accessible at the bottom
My favorite thing about Souls multiplayer is when stuff like this happens. I think npcs in 1 like Maneater Mildred and Paladin Leeroy are gestures at that possibility of allies becoming invaders/invaders becoming allies
I got DKS3 on launch day (with the season pass,apparently) so I was pretty on board to try it but got discouraged with the poor quality of the PC version (especially compared to how solid 2 was). I realized I wasn’t really so keen on playing these games at the time, so I left it, justifying the wait until either they patched the game or I got a better video card.
Well, A few weeks ago I just fired it up again and I got past a part in the early game I was stuck on, now I love it again.
Nevermind that, unlike some folks here, I rarely put more than 100 hours on each of these titles, so different people will definitely get fatigued at different rates.
I think taking a 1 year break from the series helped. There’s definitely some fatigue that builds up, no matter how good the games are.
I played DS3 immediately after finishing Bloodborne, which I think was a mistake on a few levels. I was actually, at the time, more interested in a replay of Bloodborne, but I felt like I HAD to move onto the new game because it was RIGHT THERE already. And I didn’t want to be left out of the conversation around its release. However, my enjoyment for the game was definitely hindered by the tightness and excellence of Bloodborne. As it is, I can barely remember much about DS3. I know I cleared it, but I have no memory of the final boss. Level design had begun to feel a little predictable, I agree, as if the process of level was streamlined and polished to the game’s detriment.
I am, however, hoping that once I put a year and a few more games behind me, I can revisit DS3 and its expansions with fresh-ish eyes. Hope there are still people playing to help me with the bosses though.
They recently added a new feature that shows you on the travel menu an estimate of how many players around your level are in each area.
At the time I discovered Demon’s Souls, I could rarely find anyone to summon. I waited ages by Flamelurker’s gate until I eventually got invaded. Stones of Ephemeral Eyes were not easy to come by, which is a good thing as I otherwise might have been tempted to use them as a crutch to get through the difficult levels. I only did that once, and it was a mistake.
I played Dark Souls 3 right when I got my PS4, timing my purchase with its release. I played Bloodborne some time later. Spacing these games out is probably a good idea. I still intend to play through the rearranged version of Dark Souls 2 at some point.
demon’s souls holds up well explicitly because they’re not confident in what they’re making. there is this general distrust of the game’s own mechanics pervading every zone, trying to do things that generally subvert them instead of working with them.
While they’re lesser games to Dark Douls 3, Nioh and Salt & Sanctuary are excellent at scratching the same itch while still feeling fresh and mechanically different
DS3 does try interesting new things but its feel is so similar to the others that I always felt way more in control than I should have felt, playing it.
Other than some quality of life improvements to the interface and mechanics in general (the toolbelt is a great addition), they play pretty much the same as any souls game?
Unless there’s some nuance I’m missing (I usually play a medium armor sword & board character my first time through, so this is possible) I’m nor really seeing how one could be “wildly better”?
Yeah, i get that they seem pretty identical on the surface, it’s definitely a nuanced thing. Or rather, a lot of little nuanced things. I am specifically addressing the movement physics (which to a degree also includes the animation and the way stamina works).
Dark Souls is one of the best feeling games i’ve ever played. The way your character moves feels like they have weight, and like they’re actually impacting the ground under them. Your more dynamic animations have a flawless sense of anticipation and follow through. That they tie your move speed and animation explicitly to how heavy your gear is only enhances the effect. And the (ninja)-fast-medium-slow roll system communicates really clearly and immediately how effective your dodging is. It’s really stuck with me just how finely tuned that game is in its movement and animations (despite, or maybe even partly because of, its fairly poor input lag). Demon’s Souls feels very similar but they clearly did a lot of work to tighten it up. You’re pretty weirdly floaty in DeS and the animations are more clipped.
Dark Souls 2 felt worse to me from the moment i started playing it (which was right on the heels of my first 1 full playthrough), and the reasons why crystallized for me slowly over the course of the game. As part of that game’s overall mandate of smoothing things over for (i suspect) multiplayer-related reasons, they removed the nuance of different roll types and the effect of equip weight on your walk/run speed, killing a lot of the satisfying verisimilitude. They replaced those functions with a stat (which i could write another multi-paragraph post about but rest easy, i won’t) presumably so you can wear cool armor and still do good at PvP. The result is that all your dodges look basically the same but are completely different based on how much you made that number go up, which leads to a lot of that game’s widespread perception of having poor hitboxes.
Your character also feels like they’re kinda gliding over the ground, your footfalls don’t have that same sense of impact. Attacking is slowed down even more though, so playing that game is a strange push-and-pull between this quick, slippery movement and big, slow attacks. (This actually has the mechanically harmful effect of making large weapons unviable in PvP!) And the camera is right up your character’s butt all the time, too, so it’s harder to deal with mobs (which the game throws at you in greater concentration than the first one did). Probably a lot of other little things i could name if i thought about it. It’s a drag.
3 just felt to me like 1 but quicker (and without the movement tiers, RIP movement tiers). I hated how 2 felt so much that i was easily willing to call the little bit of 3 i played “wildly better”. The movement physics in 2 were pretty plainly programmed by different folks than the ones responsible for Demon’s/Dark 1/Bloodborne/Dark 3.
It’s kind of amazing how many things 2 utterly fucks up while still being a fairly solid video game! It just comes off (to me) more like a knockoff than a “proper” Souls.
Sorry for the big post. I think about this kinda stuff too much.
Character feel was the first thing that hit me when I replayed DS2 after having nothing to do with it for a couple of years. I also still don’t like how it feels. The way the character moves makes it seem like their feet are stone blocks with greased and slightly convex bottoms; there’s a weird unpleasant weight distribution – float-footed yet sluggish – that makes merely pivoting into an ordeal. I also can’t count the number of times my character has attacked in completely the opposite direction while wielding larger weapons. If it’s intentional design it’s not one that does the game any favors.
And I agree with mauve’s comment. A lot of the observations about 3’s bosses, DLC included, are along the lines of “From has gotten better at design”, which they have, sort of, but it’s a very particular kind of boss they’ve gotten better at designing, and it’s one I grew disinterested with a while ago. Dark Souls marked the point where they became aware of what they had on their hands. I just don’t know why the Penetrator became their default boss type. I guess because it’s comparable to your own character in anatomy and weaponry, kinda?
It would be fairer to say that False King became their default boss type. Penetrator (and Flamelurker) are, at least in retrospect, dull and basic fights even to those of us who value the actiony format – all they have going for them is they’re frantic. The only bosses to really resemble them later are like Gywn, Capra Demon, Pursuer. False King is medium-paced and has a lot of interesting zoning and timing variations. It felt like a fitting capstone to the entire game.
(I suppose there are also medium-paced versions of Penetrator – mostly in DkS2 – and fast-paced versions of False King – mostly in Bloodborne.)
What’s funny to me is I had literally the exact opposite feeling from DS2 that other people did. I felt way more in control of my movement, just, like, in general. And if you try to tell me DS2’s attacks are slower I will fight you. No, really: Pick up any reasonably heavy weapon in DS1 and two-hand it and tell me how fast that feels. IIRC people tested and DS2 is same-as or faster overall. So if you think it’s slower, it’s probably a quirk of the animations.
And heavy weapons were viable in PVP. You just had to understand one thing: they were the only weapons where poise worked the way you’re used to. Particularly great axes were good.
The other Souls games feel way more like your character has no weight and or momentum on their movement, with featherweight rolls that go ridiculously far. This is fine too but it also feels a lot more imprecise.
This is probably the fighting game player in me being “oh shit, these footsies, I know them” though.
(edit: on a side note, any talk of multiplayer balance should definitely note that dark souls 1 was the ‘katanas or you’re a scrub’ game and dark souls 3 is the ‘straight swords or you’re a scrub’ game, so i’m not sure why pvp viability is even something that is brought up in the game with literally the most viable weapon diversity in the entire series…)
It may be attributable to animation quirks. I do think it is significant that a lot of people did and do find the controls and animations obtrusively unpleasant and “slow”, and am hesitant to dismiss it as another case of players wholesale damning something because it’s not exactly like what they expected (as I think is the case with some other criticisms of 2). I also don’t think people would’ve stuck with and championed Dark overall as long as they had if the character animations had “no weight or momentum.” Personally, 2 could have all the weapon and spell variety in the world and I couldn’t be bothered because it just doesn’t feel fun to play and because the mechanics encourage reactive, rather than proactive, tactics. Meanwhile, even though PvP only appealed to me for a very very brief window of time, back when I partnered up with Apol and co., I can conceive of myself returning to it in 3 now and again, provided the interactions have some organic irreverent flavor. Being summoned to a discrete arena explicitly for Honorable Duels has never been how I’ve wanted to experience fighting other players in these games.