Yeah i agree with that, and i think they got there — i have a lot more fun with Sekiro as hard as it is.
I think a little bit of that is that the dodge ‘em parry ‘em style was never my favorite, it can certainly be really fun and exhilarating but it’s so all-or-nothing. If you fuck up your timing you eat shit and probably die. Bloodborne is clearly that style, while Sekiro to me is an elaboration on the sword and board style which i just take to better. It’s still timing-based, but it demands less because you don’t have to worry as much about directional movement and spacing, it’s more about the push and pull of your stamina/posture meter
The rpg elements in Bloodborne feel vestigial and i wish they had leaned one way or another on them. like it occurred to me the other day, if you’re going to leave in numbers go up for everything else, why not let me upgrade armor? it’s wholly ignorable in Dark Souls, but pays off if you invest in it. Give me the option to make the game easier with bigger numbers
I’ve never knowingly played any Dark Souls DLC. Maybe some from DS1R? I have Bloodborne’s, and someone told me DS3’s DLC is a “must play”. Looking for some opinions here. Also:
I would 100% play Demon Souls 120fps 540p edition. Just saying.
Nah DkS3’s DLC is very far from a must play. The boss of the first DkS3 DLC is one of the better bosses in that game so if you want more Dark Souls bosses in your life in 2020, get it, otherwise not.
DkS1’s DLC was a must play at the time but I’m not sure it’s aged that well. In hindsight it was mostly just a step towards what we got in Bloodborne and DkS3 and not very notable on its own anymore. It’s hard to understand how excited people were about Artorias in retrospect.
Dark Souls 3’s DLC is not must play. The painted world one is pretty decent and expands on that concept quite well but it provides more multi-phase bossfights which I really didn’t get on with. The other two DLCs are kinda whatever.
god, don’t, you’re not missing anything. it’s imo some of the worst level & encounter design from has put together & their inexplicable decision to give every DLC enemy huge elemental resists makes tackling it without a STR/DEX build an absolute nightmare
everyone really lost their mind over the DS2 dlcs. i thought they were just alright, but yeah you pretty much have to be built to poise break and do physical damage on everything. Some Fun Boss Fights but that feels obvious. I don’t usually feel like playing through all of them
DS1’s is pretty good. it reuses assets well, the bosses are again fun to fight, it kind of does the toughest version of undead burg. fills a good niche in the second half of the game
Bloodborne’s is excellent but very difficult. you pretty much can’t do it until the very end of the game unless you’re a 360 no scope gamer. it adds some of the coolest weapons in the game and has my favorite duel type boss fights in these games
never played 3’s because it just sounded like a tedious difficulty fuck, looks pretty though
DS1 DLC is definitely worth playing. DS2 is too much. DS3 is up and down. like someone else said, the final boss of the first DLC is good fun, and snow world is pretty overall, but it’s not super well designed. the ringed city is a slog, but it has a lot of interesting weapons to mess around with.
DS3 is my favorite From video game, and the dlc is my favorite part maybe. Go ahead and lump it in with Archdragon Peak, no one will even try to stop you, and it’s almost like its own smaller game, a real special and good victory lap, so much fun stuff in there.
I wish Vilhelm was in more stuff I really liked his snide-assed skinny-knight actual literal flaming dark sword tough guy energy. Really made me smile.
I thought The Ringed City had great level design and a gorgeous atmosphere. If the difficulty were just tuned down 20% it would be a top tier level. Even as is, I had a great time, and I will admit that the crazy difficulty at least compelled me to do some fun multiplayer co-op.
I was already burning out a little bit once reaching the final/secret bosses of Ringed City and just watched a Youtube of the ending and would recommend this one weird trick for others as well.
I really just love dark souls 2 for all of its weird janky bullshit, DLC included. it’s easily the “worst” of the series in most ways but I think the world is just kind of beautiful in this broken, surreal, very videogamey way. it has the same kind of disjointed atmosphere of like simon’s quest or something. lots of areas just kind of feel like they are in some kind of void and they connect in ways that don’t make any sense. a lot of people view those as negatives and in most senses they are but I really dig the vibe it creates. DLC is definitely spread too thin but each chapter has interesting moments and generally extends the strange vibe of the rest of the game.
I also think the lore in 2 is genuinely more interesting and cool than in either part 1 or 3! it’s sad and strange the sense of scale and history to locations stuck with me more than anything in the first game did. it is certainly less subtle and at times arguably kind of ham fisted but the entire experience is still kind of incoherent so you definitely never feel like it’s too “easy” to understand.
like not to go full pretentious but the same things I like about both anodyne games is really present in dark souls 2.
Ringed City is my least favourite thing in a souls game and i think i’d rather have plodded through another half a dozen Frigid Outskirtses. opening views aside, it’s mostly ugly when you get down to the bones of the thing, all the interiors look poorly lit and samey and the exteriors have this weird fake mini golf course astroturf look to them. the game moves too fast and carelessly for whatever atmosphere they could have built, every encounter is dodge or die, and after a while it just sputters out into this aimless distended swamp section where i could no longer be bothered to do the exploring and picking up all the shiny objects routine it expected of me
only part i remember liking was the double helix tower navigation puzzle, which was about 5 minutes of the experience lol
In my last play I realized this effect – at least in the early game – is in large part about Majula. In all Soulslikes only two games have a hub bonfire where you walk not warp to the spokes: DkS1 and DkS2.
DkS1 Firelink is a triumph. It’s because of the particular unusual space it’s in. It’s some kind of cliff-edge below another cliff-edge, like a midway camp on the Grand Canyon. So you can go up the cliff, down the cliff, into a cave or laterally along the cliff. And its logical that there are elevators or narrow loading zones in every direction in this forbidding environment.
In DkS2 they had this visual concept of a seaside village. It works perfectly in and of itself, it’s one of the more beautiful hubs in the series. The problem is then they tried to repeat their organic hub-and-spoke structure that everyone praised in DkS1. They didn’t think through how to have five distinct areas reachable from a flat seaside space so they introduced these nonsensical underground stone passages with slowly opening gates.
They seemed to have learned their lesson that DkS1 was lightning in a bottle, since DkS3 and Bloodborne go partially back to the Demon’s system (except that the world is walkable in itself, just the hub is separate).
I hate that I could never beat demon prince and see the last parts of the Dark Souls 3 DLC (even after summoning two NPCs for the task) because I loved it.
All non-randomly generated Souls environments are still perfect video game magic no matter what, but the bosses got so old
