i’m probably alone but i had a great time with the stupid 3 piece gank squad at the end of Cave of the Dead (aka turbo Black Gulch). spent 80% of the time running like a lunatic from the two melee guys while trying not to get cursed, basically it only needed the benny hill music to be complete
fuck Blue Smelter and the double pet boss, though
Yeah never got past the double pet boss but to be fair we were in NG++. Maybe even +++ so…
My main memories of Ds2 vanilla DLC was the areas were very video gamey. Some boxes and elevators. What is sticking with me on this Dark Souls playthrough is how everywhere feels like somewhere in dissrepair and ruin. You see and trace what it looked like in glory. I’m not asking for a huge story but large parts of Dark Souls 2 have no living architecture.
Can’t finish this thought child climbing on me
Is there a specific order in which I should play the DLC (e.g. soul level, etc) or can I kick them the way I want?
The ice one felt to me like it was made to be a conclusion.
they were staggered on release (poison > fire > snow) but i think you can approach them in any order
Lost Izalith isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Definitely unpolished and uninteresting but I sort of like the novelty of their sheer space and exchange of clutter for ritualistic patterns. It alludes to a different understanding of civilization in contrast to the more built up ruins of the Burg and Anor Londo. In that regard I like it as a denouement to the ‘underground’ portion of the game.
because it isn’t bad, it just doesn’t occur to anyone that the contrast is intentional fsr. you call it uninteresting and then list a bunch of interesting things about it.
i feel like izalith and ash lake are subversive and conceptually thin in almost exact measure but the former gets read in bad faith as uninspired rather than ironic
Cleaning up at the end of Dark1 really taking notice how much I hurt myself by not poking around all the early game options. Instead digging on one path as hard as I could. Really supposed to look at everywhere you can go and retreat. Even though early game retreat can be hard.
Think I got stuck on my first playthrough in the catacombs.
I randomly had a flash back to one of the criticisms I had of Dark Souls 2 back when I was familiar with it (i.e. right after playing it) and that was that, in the original vanilla version at least, there was just markedly less care put into encounter design in several ways that are sort of hard to verbalize. If I point to the other Souls games they each have one big battle where you have a giant staircase or room or what have you where you are basically faced with several visual waves of enemies, basically a distinct clearly shown big gauntlet before a notable boss or location. Think of right before the 1-3 boss in Demon’s as an example. It is something they return to across the games but are smart enough to use sparingly to keep it important within the context of the game.
In contrast Dark Souls 2 has at least three of these encounters where it feels less like a “okay, this is a big moment here” and more of a “I don’t know let’s just use X here”. I’ve been mostly critical of DS 2 here which obscures the fact I still think it is a rather good game (on my backloggery page I have Demon’s and Dark as 5 stars while Dark 2 is at 4) but there is a certain level of care put into bits of world storytelling and encounter design that is often exceptional that at least initially Dark 2 lacked. People have pointed out the whole “area A next to area B makes no sense” deal before more than enough times but that same relative lack of attention showed up in many different design areas which again I think is why coming off of the first two games there was a bit of a “there is something lacking here” reaction to it.
I know people mostly moved on from this but it literally flashed across my mind earlier after I had basically forgotten about it years ago.
You pinpointed specifically what got better in SotfS. Enough that my opinion kind of flipped, the encounter design in every other Souls game can feel kind of haphazard compared to SotfS.
At least with respect to how the encounter design deliberately narrows down your tactical options to test certain skills. In DkS1 and Demon’s, beating the severe tests can feel more like a matter of luck (or mastering strange accidental mechanics like wakeup behavior) than skill at the core mechanics. In DkS3, it feels blandly fair and balanced (the emblematic disappointment for me there is that the nu-Anor Londo archer is not difficult)
DkS2 might still be overall weaker in terms of storytelling via level design. But even in this respect, there’s many new “oh!” moments in SotfS, like the new Flexile Sentry in the knee-deep water before Lost Sinner, which is memorable and demands either extreme skill or extreme cheese
wasn’t there originally a second flexile sentry ambling around on the path to drangleic castle? that’s definitely one of the vanilla decisions that’s just weird and doesn’t feel like anything. finding him in the flooded prison in scholar both feels like an appropriate environment (at least based on precedent) and a natural progression of challenge from the rising water battle in no-man’s wharf
so there’s fewer question marks over your head and more “oh i see what i’m in for here”
FWIW my big complain about Dark Souls 1, a game I legit adore, is that it did lack that sort of environmental storytelling that Demon’s had and is probably why I still rank it just below said game. Dark 2 was a further step down from that which is a shame as that was one of the things that drew me to Demon’s.
I know it’s not like a huge thing, but in Stonefang Tunnel in Demon’s how you start at a mining operation and keep digging further and further with the “man-made” tunnels slowly and subtly being replaced by ones dug by giant bugs with things getting hotter and more lava-ey until you somehow crash through to a buried temple of worship to an ancient dragon is the sort of thing that made me fall in love with the game. It isn’t like a full big story and you could make a great game without anything like that (see some of the other Souls games) but it being one of the things that got more and more diminished in further games was a legit shame and while I can appreciate one being so into the other well done aspects for it to not mean much… for those who were into it its absence is felt.
[this was mostly in response to a post which pointed to a few parts of dark souls 1 that are diegetically unconvincing next to similar parts in 2, and said that none of the souls worlds truly feel lived-in save the first city zone in bloodborne]
i’ve thought about this and ultimately i don’t really know exactly what dark souls 1 does to lull me into a suspension of disbelief about these things, though it’s definitely harder to return to after bloodborne raised the bar.
there’s a certain kind of theatricality to the way characters express themselves and pop in and out of locations, as if you can imagine stage exits just off-screen that you are not privy to. but this slight unreality is aesthetically reinforced; the world curls around on itself in loops and knots and very often does deceive you about what is tangibly nearby.
right from the beginning the game works hard to draw your eye to rays of light in the distance and twisted arboreal shapes in the periphery of your vision instead of your immediate surroundings. and even when looking at what’s right in front of you there’s a degree of removal, a subtle layer of mist or the way light dances off metal and stonework, prompting you to ponder things between and beyond.
Yeah this is what i like about dark souls, it feels goofy and unserious but also confident in this theatrical way.
demon’s souls is hard as fuck imo, it reminds me of how much i struggled with dark1 back in 2013
i am using the temple knight with the halberd which seems strong but it is slow as fuck and any time there are fast enemies like the hounds i am getting annihilated lol
upside is RPCS3 runs demon’s extremely well nowadays, far better than the last time i gave it a go. i was able to take down the phalanx and find the monumental and now i’m just exploring and trying to farm some souls to level my character, hopefully that will help me stay alive. some of these devilish setpieces are wrecking my shit repeatedly
After really exhausting myself on Demon’s PS3 years ago I spent a lot of a weekend recently playing the remake on PS5 and, while I generally dislike the remake relative to the original, my god, it’s just such a good fucking game. No one including From has ever done better than Boletaria.
i killed armored spider and tower knight on stream
feeling much better about this game
Every new souls game, every new level I play, I’m ranking them against Boletaria 1-1
The combination of logical environment that allows surface spatial complexity to be mapped and understood by function, the interesting traps (my favorite boulder trap they’ve done, and the turnaround!, and the dragon trap), the enemy groups that teach the fundamentals of pulling and aggression without a word of dialogue, the beautiful, satisfying shortcuts that offer relief at safety in combination with the revelatory spatial understanding the prompt, and the simplest, purest form of From’s just-off-generic D&D fantasy aesthetic.
Dark Souls 1 is best at surprising and teasing the player and far and away stuffed with the most revelations but its mythos-delving cost it a lot of the suggestive atmosphere that Demon’s gives me.
Still, there’s a reason I’m spending tonight building a list of mechanical and level design surprises in that game to set a baseline expectation.
I wish I had as much knowledge and enthusiasm about DeS but I remember how much trouble the spider gave me my first time, glad you’re easing into the game
Cuba got a PS5?