loving the LPs
thinking about what people were saying about Kings Field losing something when moving to PS2, I wonder if this being played on low settings adds to the feeling of it in a way that the highest settings lose? not sure if what you have it at is better or worse than when i played vanilla 360.
watched this whilst listening to stars of the lid. fell into the most blissful sleep
@diplo if you want to talk souls here, it may be more fruitful. the game is just so long that thereâs no way i can provide meaningful insight during the entire playthrough. what i might end up doing eventually is writing a piece and then dubbing it over edited footage illustrating my point. that might be the best of both worlds, because if i just write it it will be obvious how bad i am at writing ;_;
i do want to talk about the length of the game, but iâm still putting my thoughts together
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Played through most of Dark2âs DLC to get a better handle on my thoughts. All that really happened was that I only came away with my prior opinions reinforced
Sunken King: Still think this is the best of the three by far. Level design has a couple of overly goofy gimmicks, the barren interiors are disappointing, but the way you weave around major landmarks is distinct, the non-European architectural motifs are a welcome change, and I purposefully got myself into a couple of awkward positions while going down to fight Elana that made me appreciate that descending sequence more. Elana herself is garbage, a boss that only works in spite of the mechanics. âRun in, hit target a couple of times, run away and heal at some perimeter of the rectangle, hope thing doesnât slam you.â The room desperately needs some columns for cover. The trio is tedious and over-designed, the path to them is a mess. Sinh is fine, if a little flat after having fought Kalameet.
Iron King: Thereâs like⌠almost nothing to look at here. A prime example of how much better a low-poly look would be for the game. Reducing almost all of your environmentâs visual assets to âbrown bedrock stoneworkâ for a PS3/4 game is wrongheaded. This is also where the black phantom AI manners appreciably improve imo. I like the lance-poking asshole who retreats down a stairwell, and being confronted with a whole group of black phantoms just works as a surprise. As boring and neither-here-nor-there as the level design and assets are I kinda like the through line of chunky dumb gigantism: the big headless club-slammers, the armored sculptures hanging from chains, the mega-cock turbine going through the main towerâs central shaft, etc. Fume Knight didnât excite me after Bloodborne or DS3 and I was already bored fighting Alonne and the reskinned Smelter Demon on my second attempts. Canât help but restate how shit the âco-opâ gauntlets are. You never see phantom insignias around them because no one wants to bother with their miserable bullshit after completing them themselves. Also the AI helpers are more of a hindrance.
Ivory King: My least favorite part of Dark Souls 2 and the #1 reason why I get sad when anyone refers to the entire DLC as a general improvement over the base game. If Brume Tower canât figure out what it wants to be, Ivory Kingâs fort/town complex hasnât even graduated beyond the status of placeholder level design. All of the interiors are dead-upon-arrival boxes with the occasional visual stimulant of boxes or barrels. This was never a castle or a town; itâs clearly vacuous Game Design that exists solely to serve as a challenge to the player. Again, I can play a hundred other videogames that provide mechanically engaging challenges, so why would I care about a place in a Souls game thatâs stripped away all of its narrative suggestiveness and doesnât even work on the level of fantasy? I do like in theory that you have to re-explore places to find Buddy Knights whoâll help with the big sword guy boss but the fight itself again is kind of a mess that exists simply because the devs knew that the most determined players would get through it. Frigid Outskirts is a cool idea (really, I donât mind having to wait for intervals of visibility to get my bearings) thatâs kind of ruined by having more than two of those electrical reindeer; severely restricting their appearance wouldâve made this the least garbage co-op gauntlet, perhaps even allowing it to be O K.
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i love this area and i also love the giraffes or whatever equine shit is going on there, including when they gang up (i think you can avoid this via careful aggro zoning, disposing of them quickly, using the structures as cover) but the double pet boss is justâŚ
ugh
From that hbomberguy fellow.
Man this just reminds me of @meauxdalâs complaint about video essays
Iâd totally read this as text, but eighty minutes of video full of critical points ⌠oof
Plinkett ruined the nature of internet criticism
I did watch twelve minutes and have two rebuttals:
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DS2 is the game among 'em all that Iâve died the most times in while healing myself. This guy himself seemed to be going on personal experience to make his own point, so I am as well. Also worth noting that I almost never use the estus flask to heal bc the majority of my killed-while-healing instances involved the flask, not a gem
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He criticizes the O&S boss fight for not really letting you focus on one opponent for the sake of a âstraightforward duelâ but DS2 does this with Not-Ornstein and itâs one of the gameâs most deflated fights. O&Sâs first phase only works as a kind of unfair yet not (thanks to columns + differentiation of movesets) 2 v 1 encounter (and, consequently, the second phase only works bc youâre set against a more threatening version of one of the two)
Best bet seems to be summoning the two AI helpers and then making a beeline for the ice bridge, using them as distractions, but you need to be aware of what the beeline is, and also summoning powers up the boss, so
i like the bits i watched of the video @Mr_Mechanical posted by and large, but yeah, no way in hell i can sit through the whole thing
being hit while healing is a complete non-issue for me. it doesnât bother me to get hit while healing, it just makes me realize i fucked up. i donât have any opinion on that element whatsoever.
focus on mobs of enemies is one of the best things about ds2, and i love how it punishes you for abusing the lock-on mechanic, which he wisely highlights. the way ds1 teaches you to play is subverted and disrupted in ds2, and it is to ds2âs benefit
the addition of lifegems to estus is a great success for exactly the reasons he highlights. the heal-over-time is a clever way of balancing the healing against their ubiquity and unlimited nature, and relying on estus alone, while ensuring that everyone is experiencing the same âbalanceâ in terms of what your estus is capable of healing through, is in fact rather frustrating for the reasons he highlights (feeling like youâve already doomed your run to a boss because you took too much damage on the way, with estus being the only way to heal it). the mobs of enemies are an important counter-balancing force; youâre not often going to have time to use any of your healing items while running from 5 foes, whereas a single enemy is not usually able to pressure you enough to entirely discourage it. the game, as a result, is far less oppressive on a moment to moment basis than ds1.
i didnât see his take on O&S as a knock on ds1 as much as an assertion that Oâs appearance in ds2 was welcomed and that heâd previously wished it was possible. for the record, i enjoy that fight - itâs too easy for me now but it was impossible without summoning the first time i tried it.
i also agree that the human bosses with armor and weapons are the best in the series and feel the most satisfying.
At the very least, they always felt the most fair. Hitboxes for any non-human scaled/shaped enemy have been pretty dicey across the entire series and have never really improved, which is actually one of the major weaknesses of Bloodborne. It happens far too often that fights are simply displaying scale and they are typically very poor at making a landscape where the scale makes sense, in addition to often making it difficult to judge distance and spacing. Human-ish enemies, on the other hand, because they are typically scaled to the player in some way, feel as if they are something made to be fought, rather than awed at from afar. Actually feel like a lot of bosses in the series were probably at one point just background entities (particularly dragons) which they decided to include as encounters in the game, but never really figured out how to include them in a meaningful way.
Hitboxes, no, not really, excepting Paarlâs AOE. The biggest issue is the cameraâs insufficiencies at handling big guys.
I donât get this guyâs complaints about being killed while healing, at all. Itâs just the most negative consequence of using that mechanic at the wrong time. The more you play, the more you intuit the timeframes and improve.
It seems clear to me that the gemstones are a way of letting the encounter design expand to include inseparable tracking enemies. As a consequence, youâre simply going to get hit a lot more, so youâll need some way of mitigating that. If you accept that I think the question becomes, like, how does that actually play out. I just happen to prefer Bloodborneâs mitigations, the faster mechanics, the dependable i-frames, the couple of alternative healing mechanics
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I donât really care about the mechanical distinctions. I really like his interpretation of the gameâs narrative, and I think itâs as generous as you can be to it without going completely off the rails to things unsupported by the text. His analysis of Dark 1 as a game where you are mostly a passive observer, and picking over the ruins of an already-dead world, versus Dark 2 as a game where you are a direct participant in the plot, says it all. His personal joys lead him to prefer the latter, while I prefer the former. I think archaeology is one of the strongest points of videogames.
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Just my experience, but Iâve died numerous times (far more often than not) to being smashed into the ground or knocked back by, from what I can tell, something completely invisible to me. The hitboxes werenât bad for you, but from the beginning of this series Iâve experienced the frustration of dying to being stabbed by invisible weapons (because for better or worse, the hitboxes of most attacks are wider than the actual attack). This isnât really deniable, there are videos showing this. Mostly just a question of whether youâre bothered by it or not.
The tracking is also seriously aggressive, but I donât really have a problem with that. And yeah, the i-frames mitigate this to some degree.
Someone gave me a timestamp where he talks about the âfree-associationâ design of the world and I swear to god if anyone ever talks about the Earthen Peak/Iron Keep misalignment in a negative or positive context Iâm gonna mummify on the spot. I find the reference to the overlapping macro map layouts as a reading of the game as dreamlike particularly unconvincing bc I donât really feel those overlappings while playing the game. Stuff mostly feels separate (it is this distinct separateness that I think made some not take to the world design). I think youâd have to have a pretty incredible internal sense of imaginative spatial organization to discern these abutments
Itâs⌠almost never happened to me in BB. The assertion that the majority of your deaths in the game were due to bad hitboxes is so alien to me I canât even offer a counterpoint. Iâm just sorry it happened and marred your experience. I continue to experience my weapons going through others and theirs going through me in DS2 often enough that itâs a recollectible phenomenon, but itâs not that frequent for me to call it a major weakness of the game.
I donât understand either how bad hitboxes can be that big of a deal in a game where your options to react are primarily shieldblock, iframe rolling or staggering them during their windup. Do the hitbox complaining people use backstep all the time, or something?
Interestingly yes, I tend to use backstep almost all the time because I believe (dunno with how much merit) that it puts the most distance between me and the enemy (strategy changes with some bosses). Also allows for follow-up attacks, which the side dodges donât as much. What I typically do when Iâm playing melee characters (tend to play casters).
generous hitboxes can also be seen as a way of forcing you to rely on [quote=âBroco, post:241, topic:4251â]
shieldblock, iframe rolling or staggering
[/quote]
instead of finding cheesier ways of dealing with enemies (e.g. exploiting their hitboxes).
idk, i have only maybe twice in the entire time iâve played ds games thought âwow that was bullshitâ
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the thing with the hitboxes in souls is that it works both ways. i feel like iâve gotten hits that looked off as much as iâve been hit by them.
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