you know, I never played scholar of the first sin, so all my views on ds2 are colored by how… mediocre the base game was
did they ever sort out that one lava castle looking like a super mario level remade in unreal engine 3?
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Not at all. I may be wrong, but I can’t be THAT wrong in remembering that they did nothing at all to Iron Keep. At least not in the way you might think a second pass would inspire the devs to, in both versions you just fight through almost a literal queue of katana or archer knights on your way to the bosses. It’s baffling to me. DS2 devs are clearly proud about that place.
It’s because of this I sometimes wonder if there is a genius to Iron Keep I just need to train more to appreciate.
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The fact that the first boss of Iron Keep is optional is pretty interesting. He just guards a bonfire. You can choose to skip and keep going until the next bonfire. I can’t think of anything exactly analogous in any other Souls game?
The most boring queue of katana knights is right before that boss. I think they might’ve made it extra boring and time-consuming to raise the stakes of the fight-or-not decision.
Still, I wouldn’t exactly go to bat for this level design
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I like fighting the Alonne knights in succession because of their attack speed. I think Iron Keep tests your ability to strike first. Their AI and attack patterns aren’t interesting, sure, but having to fight 10 of them one after the other does a good job of teaching the precise moment to hit the attack button as they run up and start swinging. If you mistime it, you get counterhit and swarmed by the next couple guys. Iron Keep was the first major difficulty spike for me for this reason, having done my first playthrough with the same Heide knight sword for the entire journey.
Also, DS2 seems to have the biggest variance in counterhit damage compared to other games, which kind of bolsters this combat design mentality. You get a sizable bonus for hitting them as they’re about to hit you. Risky but fun
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Maybe it’s because I was using a sorcerer, but I didn’t find the Iron keep initial section tedious, but just hard and challenging. I didn’t want to go for the optional boss and kept going. I also did not find the belfry sol bonfire, initially… Basically, on my first serious run I did 90 per cent of the level and tension was building up, since I couldn’t find any bonfire, and the experience was great. Unfortunately I died where a hammer guy was, after some fire spitting statues and right before the final boss, and had to redo all from scratch.
Maybe it’s subjective, but despite the lack of enemies variety I found the Iron Keep a great level, and pretty complex architecturally.
But then, Blight town was one of my favourite levels in DS1 (on the Switch, without the infamous slowdowns), and it’s not liked by many people, so who knows…
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Blighttown actually completely owns, I think it was initially hated for compounding reasons like toxins and slowdown, but these issues are easily mitigated with items or just hustling on. Once you realize all the ladders are marked by torches, it becomes easy to navigate, and you realize the actual part you want to be at is the very bottom, where it’s vast and open and easy to see where you need to go.
I feel like the only Souls talk I can contribute is “I really like that part” but I can’t stop myself from posting it
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It was all that plus the game running at like 13fps on PS3 while you were there lol
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Yeah, I understand you, and I went decidedly to Sotfs without thinking twice.
But the thing is, even after Sotfs, Dark souls 2 (even Sotfs) has been marked as a (comparatively) bad game, as something decidedly inferior to 1, and as something that cannot nearly compare to Bloodborne, while playing it today, I don’t find it to be the case at all. And this hasn’t been repeated enough.
So, my thinking is not much that “people misunderstood ds2 at launch” (they did not), but rather almost nobody gave the right appreciation to Sotfs afterwards, and it keeps the fame of something under average (and somehow obscure)… while for example, everybody will say loudly that Bloodborne is a masterpiece, unquestioned.
I was interested in playing Sotfs, and I was pretty shy about it; Broco gave me the advice to do so (“it holds up”) and even after starting it, a few months later, I was initially pretty skeptical… but that skepticism went away completely.
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Can someone explain to me what SotFS does differently than original? Like I hear “SotFS fixes everything” and then conversation usually dies because like… Yeah
having played them in reverse order i don’t think SotFS makes a significantly different impression from the original. generally the encounters have some better variety & balance but i think a lot of the gushing you see online is a mix of novelty/nostalgia from returning players who were primarily re-experiencing something familiar in more vivid lighting and 60fps (on consoles), with a few twists on what they remembered to keep it “fresh”. i was still a lot more struck by the janky mechanics and disjointed world than by “oh hey there’s a dragon in heide’s tower”
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Dark Souls fucking owns. So excited to go back to it each night this week. Didn’t make any real progress tonight but a lot of real poking, looking at a guide and realizing I had made like every possible choice to avoid having good weapons and spent an hour just now fixing that (I also had really terrible drops.)
At the door step of one of the 4 lords after upgrading 3 weapons so much better prepared. I got through anor londo because of that crystal halbard! Oh yeah there’s like 5 blacksmiths and thst I didn’t spend any time in Darkroot was a real drag on Poison Swamp.
Now I see where to buy a necessary item but am also determined to jus-oh just remembered where it is lol.
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What’s the expected Stamina limit in 1?
exactly 160, excluding ring of F&P, though you can still upgrade equip load past endurance lv40
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Pumping Stamina until the bar is longer than your health bar is the only acceptable approach.
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my DS1 pyro was buffed ASAP to full stamina but i never quite got around to upping my vitality to match so she died in like two hits from any boss. i never quite got into Lost Izalith
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I found if I equip Ring of Favor and Protection and Havel’s Ring there’s hardly any need to level up VIT and I can put all my points into offense
Everyone knows F&P is good, but Havel’s Ring acts as a multiplier on top of the END equip weight benefit so it’s even more OP in my experience. Can wear 2 or 3 pieces of the Havel/Giant set and still fast roll
(The devs must’ve noticed because in future Souls they both split off equip weight into its own stat and also lowered the multiplier percent on Havel’s Ring)
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How good are the three DLC episodes of DS2? All three are good or is there something I should skip?
They’re all fine. Ice Boletaria is the least gimmicky while the other two have a lot more ‘did I collect this thing/hit that switch?’ going on however the areas intended for co-op play are hideous and barely (not) worth the effort
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there’s a fun easter egg in SotFS if you go back into the shaded woods after progressing to a certain point in the Ivory King DLC
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