it only shows up as a reply when there’s other posts inbetweens yours and theirs
BB is weird cuz I could try to stylistically describe the soundtrack and it prob wouldn’t hit any of the things that tend to excite me. Some of the appreciation is just comparative – like, oh god, there is almost nothing I enjoy about the Dark Souls trilogy’s soundtracks, and thank goodness here’s something that’s a little scaled back and in line with the taut purposefulness of Demon’s Souls’ score, even though the orchestra’s size has grown. But I really do like a lot of its tracks on their own. A few months ago I was on my front porch during evening listening to this, which feels like it embodies all of my experiences with the game and ineffably suggests something more, like this does for Demon’s.
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The soundtracks have definitely seemed less purposeful since Demon’s Souls, but I think this is a product of their semi-non-linearity, often not knowing how and when the player will encounter something. There’s an assumption I think that the boss music is what really matters, but much like sound effects, ambient music often sets the mood. Additionally, it’s difficult to get that right in any game recently, because while the availability/quality of music has continued to increase, it seems to lead to choice paralysis by the game creators, often making the music of any given game feel disjointed or detached from what’s being shown on-screen (due to not being able to decide upon or define what the game’s mood should be, much less how to project it through music). There are other problems related to modern games production and audio, but that’s a different can of worms.
for how much people talk about boss themes in souls games i can’t recall a single one, maybe that’s good in ‘if you don’t notice it then it is doing it’s job’ way but i’m always surprised when people reference them expecting me to able to recall them
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tbt my friend mixing shed into dks3 soundtrack on boiler room tho
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In Demon’s and Dark 1, at least, there is no ambient music, except in the safe hub. One of the things that immediately struck me about Demon’s the first time I played was that there was only music during boss fights.
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I’d chalk that up to a variety of budget and time constraints, though in Demon’s at least, it works very well due to the pacing and more straightforward design. Given the considerable scale increase of Dark 1, I think it’s less successful there.
haven’t finished my run of dks2 because i’m having too much co-oping with rei so i’ve been saving bosses
in the meantime, i started up a NG+ run on my old lightning murakumo build. SO MUCH NEW STUFF
ng : ng+ :: vanilla : sotfs
I’m going to buy a PS4 and Bloodborne now.
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Make sure to share thoughts in here or the BB thread
Dark 2’s NG+ is great and I can’t for the life of me figure out why 3 ignored adding black phantoms to the mix while deciding that strewing about Life Ring +1s was the one idea worth bringing over. But I guess 3 mostly goes about as if the second game didn’t exist at all, so (some of that probably has to do with concurrent/separate dev cycles). An ideal NG+ would be along the lines of SotFS, I think – just rearranging enemy positions
I accidentally read a bit of a thread reacting to that defense of Dark 2 and I really wish we could destroy the idea of ‘lol B Team’ as an auto-indictment of Bad Content but it seems pretty well stuck now
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I wish I could somehow carry forward my old PS3 DkS2 save to play NG+ SotFS, y’all are making me curious
it’s so great, but i don’t want to spoil anything!
look at this nice wiki
Yeah, it’s pretty great.
I do think it’s somewhat odd (even though I shouldn’t) that the game being different was the strongest indictment against it, when the presumption always seemed to be, from DS1 fans, that different was the goal.
I feel like this is the normal path for new/different games. “We like this thing because it is different from what we played before! Now keep making it the same over and over again till we start complaining about how nothing is different!”
this is pretty blasé, right? the strongest indictment was that it felt so cheap and inelegant at first blush compared to DeS and DkS1. it still had its moments but claiming that they just didn’t like it because it was different is revisionist.
I’m not saying people didn’t have their reasons, but it seemed like a reaction to “the B team” as much as it was actually being cheap or inelegant. Not to mention that those complaints have existed for every game since Souls existed (technically even before that, if we consider the King’s Field/Shadow Tower Abyss fans).
that’s because the first two souls titles were actually way more elegant in their design than From’s previous RPG work?
I’m not saying they devalue DkS2 completely by any means but pretending it’s not there is kind of silly
I’ve visited other forums to try to cobble together people’s general negative impressions and a bunch aren’t really reducible to “This is different and I’m mad” (some are, though). Characterizing them like that gets at the condescension meauxdal has been keen to avoid, and it’s also untrue. I-frames tend to come up and I’ve wondered if people might’ve been more open to the ADP thing if the game allowed you to make subtle but appreciable modifications to all your base abilities; e.g., leveling up your endurance would have the primary effect of lengthening your stamina bar and would also quicken stamina recovery. This could all be clearly explained on the level-up menu, and I think it’d make me for once give a damn about the things I put my points into in these games.
I’ve been appreciating the bosses more from the perspective of what the new mechanics do to reorient your approach to combat – in that sense, bosses like the Ruin Sentinels work extraordinarily well – but I think the criticism stands of what a prevalent typology does to diminish excitement (and I think that video defending Dark 2 repositions an argument by relabeling the criticism of sameiness as one of having a problem with the idea of a weapon-wielding humanoid in an arena). After a while it’s just painfully obvious to me that I’m doing the same dance of managing stamina, rolling at the right time, and doling out a couple or few attacks when it’s opportune. I don’t share the appreciation the “hardcore” players who’ve streamed these games for years do to discern the minute difference between bosses’ attack delays/chains/ranges/etc. to get excited about Alonne or whatever.
Executioner Chariot still owns
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Or, as I said at the head of the thread,