Fatigued Souls

King of Posters
#327

[quote]Oops I remembered the DS2 thread that had that one guy making 50000 posts about how We the Consumers were betrayed by graphics. It’s actually intolerable to see that opinion dominate the preview vid comment sections now

i think about that thread as i lay my head to pillow every night

God… Frickin RIP game that had darker hall with skeletons …
What coulda been… If only sparks when you hit enemies were huger

did you know that no man’s sky was false advertising and didnt even have brontosaurus
here’s my mass effect andromeda opinion

What is anyone seeing in the preview footage that would’ve made Dark2 Game of All Time
If only salamander pit had better tiling for floors

i mean it looked nice yeah, and it is a little disingenuous to minimize the effect of Mood on what souls is? or just the cumulative effect of a million tiny detail differences

It’s just that there’s no realistic way that moved the game from Ultimate Dark Experience to lmao shit tier b team. I think it built up an imaginary game in some people’s heads that was better than anything it could’ve been realistically

it wasn’t just that. and i never quite got the impression preview thing was held up as lost true ultimate so much as just "heh they really got one over on us the crooks"
I See

You should read the comments on the vids then bc that’s def what ppl are lamenting

no
it’s probably worth a mild lament or two at any rate
but magnification of gammer

I guess. It’s hard for me to feel it fully when I have the ‘What if it Had PS1 Graphics’ opinion

maybe you wouldn’t have had that if you’d played Shin Dark 2

I think I’d like both. The final result is kind of frustrating I think because it does seem to be in between two really interesting formal conclusions

space between two formal conclusions…almost…dreamlike…

No. …[/quote]

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#328

I did like that area from the beta better when it was pitch black and you actually had to use the torch mechanic, though.

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#329

The game is surprisingly richer with just that dark mechanic being there. It’s implemented somewhat amateurishly, but it’s still attempting to innovate a formula, which Dark 3 never did in my experience (Dark 3 very much seems like a greatest hits edition of the past Dark games).

#330

Doing a playthrough where I’ve not +'d my HP once and have to say Amana is even better when you die in three hits

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#331

If this is the strongest indictment, it’s not much, really. All of these games feel “inelegant” at first blush. In fact, I don’t know if they ever get to a point of feeling elegant at all. Bloodborne might get closest but it’s never total.

I’m having a lot of thoughts about Dark2 now that I’ve replayed it a few times this year and it’s weird to also have the feeling that the critical discussion around it never developed beyond a bunch of first/second impressions that were standardized by the matthewmatosis video. Really the only significant pushback in the years since was that hmbomberguy vid someone linked itt. I thought these were the sorts of games that prompted continual reexaminations but maybe Dark2 just was so hopes-dashing that that majority decided that was that. It simply became a convenient dumping ground for collective frustrations.

#332

yeah but you are so much of a hardcore formalist in some respects that I’m not sure if you’re even capable of acknowledging perceived jank as a flaw. I’ll grant that it is often a shallow criticism but to claim that it’s insignificant is ridiculously dismissive of overall impressions

#333

I am.

#334

Anyway, I would recommend replaying the game if you’d like to participate in discussing it! I think you finished it in the first week of its release and then moved on, letting your initial opinion be your final opinion. That speaks to a sort of overconfidence and ease of disposability of experience that I think is more of a blindspot than “hardcore formalism” (whatever that means in my case?). I was a bit more investigative and time-taking in my first playthrough and also bothered with NG+ but I also split off from the game at an unfair point and I know beyond a doubt now that that deformed the opinions I held in the time between then and now.

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#335

I think it probably took me two or three weeks but fair point, I have wanted to give it another look for a while

can’t remember if the PC/PS4 SotFS is supposed to be not-representative or if that’s an OK one to revisit?

#336

Ive played about half of Scholar on PS4 and it is a definitive upgrade

I think ive come back around to the opinion i held on DS2 when i last played it in 2015 (that it’s pretty good, despite making a few choices that are really not my thing). I do appreciate it on its own terms more, now that i have the rest of the series to contextualize it.

#337

still say dark souls 2 is the best multiplayer game of the souls brand by leagues

it has footsies, man

footsies

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#338

It also has double old whip!

I loved there being a viable whip combination.

Mauve and rude talk about how much they liked DS2 multi into darkness.

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#339

getting old whip at the start of my only playthrough of DkS2 by accident was definitely one of the best parts

even though (especially because) it had such a ridiculously stiff castlevania attack animation

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#340

does anyone want to co-op pc sotfs

btw sotfs is vastly better than vanilla. only play vanilla if you want the contextualization for the encounter variations imo

#341

[quote=“Iacus, post:890, topic:4635, full:true”]
The removal of inventory load[/quote]

Having an inventory load worked for Demon’s Souls where you could warp to the hub, and Thomas, from any of the checkpoints. I don’t think its removal was an eventuality. Its abence in Dark Souls isn’t even inarguably justified when every bonfire is a potential dumping ground.

Worth noting that Dark2 did streamline a bunch of things that did need streamlining before 3. It’s too bad that Bloodborne did the same as Dark Souls with a hidden HUD rather than making it automatically hidden.

Also I think the ease of transferring to another covenant post-Dark Souls made sense given how covenants came to function but for me it is one part of a broader dulling of design with covenants codifying as mere entry points for PvP in certain areas (but I also don’t care for PvP outside of organic confrontations, so).

#342

yeah it’s sort of a bummer how easy it is to switch up your loadout and covenant in DS3. it just feels like there’s less of a weird coherent attachment to the world through covenants. I liked building covenants in the first DS because if I was going for one, a lot of times I was building my character around it

it also makes interactions with characters relating to covenants feel slightly inorganic and very video-gamey too!

#343

i need to motivate myself to play ds3 again but i keep wanting to just play ds2. i haven’t finished ds3 yet, i got stuck in the catacombs (skeleton boulder and rat area before the boss) and, after revisting ds2, i’ve found it almost impossible to muster the motivation to return.

i like the graphics and environments and architecture in ds3, but something feels empty about it. i don’t know why something so well-crafted should bore me so much :confused:

need to spend more time with it, of course

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#344

It had other consequences. Most annoying of all, being unable to pick up some rare treasure due to overburden, which would disappear forever on a level load.

Keeping track of inventory weight doesn’t add any meaningful friction and it’s counterproductive in a game with such a rich variety of items. On the other hand, it adds a fair amount of empty busywork for the player and a source of management anxiety.

Sure, you can go to Thomas, but why not just streamline the whole process?

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#345

why not kill Thomas and live hard

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#346

I appreciate the efforts 2 makes to distance itself from the first game and I think the third game’s forceful retreat to Dark Souls’ material is one part of the answer about why it feels empty

That’s why shit like 2’s Sunbro Meme covenant are so grating. It doesn’t fit with stuff like the shattered remnants of the (or a) Lordvessel in the Majula mansion’s basement. It’s an uninterestingly unresolved tension between wanting to treat all of Dark Souls as some arbitrary, forgettable point in history and attempting to satisfy a portion of the fanbase with mere reprisal

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