I find the warping to be the most grating thing about the games that aren’t Dark, because I played Dark first and really appreciated how I progressed on foot with logical shortcuts. Demons’ has some of this within the worlds, but it’s really special in Dark to e.g. get the elevator from the chapel back to Firelink. I would really enjoy a denser map in the next game, maybe a city along the lines of Sapienza in Hitman.
Loading in to the Hunter’s Dream to do banking was really irritating in particular - I don’t know what purpose it serves other than restoring leveling up through an NPC.
100% agreed and it just reflects how I started with Dark instead of Demon’s.
The most thrilling thing about the overall level design was the inter-level connectivity and the way it would trigger extremely real feelings of “I’ve explored a place” and while Bloodborne has decent interconnectivity on most of its levels, they do feel totally isolated from each other, lack interlevel connectivity especially as the game goes on and most of them are only accessible via warp.
i have a lot of affection for demon’s… it feels like the last time a truly excellent game just came out of nowhere and had this really organic kind of word-of-mouth buzz
i feel like this is undermined a little by the bright orange fog gates that you can’t get through until you have the mcguffin
There’s one really amazing shortcut in Bloodborne (the ladder from the woods to Iosefka’s) but it doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
I like driving around town without GPS or a destination on my days off in order to “find shortcuts” because I just haven’t found a game that scratches that itch.
Going from Demon’s to Dark was super jarring because I took the master key on my first playthrough unbeknownst that it would end up getting me super lost and overwhelmed having New Londo, Valley, Burg, and the Catacombs all available at the start of the game.
Ah, I just plain never got to one before I had the vessel. I can see how if you immediately went to the archives after the Anor Londo bonfire it’d be a bummer.
I straight up ignored everything but undead burg. The “choices” at the beginning seemed super biased, considering you’d be hard pressed to find transient curses for New Londo and Catacombs just being generally too strong for SL1
They offered you a clear choice outside of linearity but to be honest it seemed like they very clearly wanted you to pick Undead
Although I might just be projecting super hard, because I’m very bad at Dark Souls
Same, and a livestream. It’s not much. All I was reminded of was the escalative principle in stuff like DBZ where you pass a point and it’s all ‘, BUT BIGGER!!!’ There’s no impact anymore. Who cares. From can’t do anything else with the mechanics, so they iterate on enemy HP/aggression. One of the giant slammer boys attacks like seven times in a row and then jumps up into the air for a finishing slam. The level design could’ve stood on its own, but it really doesn’t, and flowers + tombstones aren’t an interesting formal juxtaposition anymore.
Bloodborne is very very good but if you find the failure/repeat cycle too much, yeah, you should just skip it, or make definite plans to do a co-op run with someone else who will help with every boss (I would tentatively volunteer)
While obviously Dark’s interconnected map is its Huge Thing in contrast with Demon’s, and is wonderful, I think it’s missing the point to shrug off Demon’s’s’s non-interconnectedness as simply inferior. Dark represents a pilgrimage, people all congregating around the base of Mount Olympus to relight the old religion. But in Demon’s you are visiting foreign lands, only to see them all fall to the same corruption - you get some idea of the reach of this horrible curse.
The broken archstone in the Nexus is one of the most evocative symbols in videogames, right up there with the erupting volcano in Battlezone.
Not really! I like dungeons which are separate from mazes (maze-like dungeons are low tier next to properly jacquayed dungeons with landmarks and frequent semi-informed decision points)
There’d be ways to make it more convenient and integrated but that would only scrub out its emotive qualities of dislocation and reverie that I like a lot and find crucial to its design.
I can see that. I like the location itself and the changes it goes through.
When I’m dying a lot and need to farm healing items and echoes, the 30-45 second buffer to and from it just reminds me of pushing things live at my old job and mashing F5 until I could check them.
Emotive games break down really quickly for me when they’re frustrating as software, though, see The Last Guardian.
The more these games have aged the less I’ve seen interconnectivity and internal loop-arounds as excellent and promotable qualities unto themselves. I think they can be engaging but it’s not my gold standard. Everyone flipped out about Dark 2’s DLC being a Return to Form by having more shortcuts compared to the main game and I just 100% did not care. I think the thing that most excites me about the level designs from a macro perspective now is being able to get the gestalt of a layout through distant views of landmarks and routes, and then going on to explore that plan with some subversions here and there. But even Bloodborne doesn’t really have that, with its prioritization of sheer density over broad vistas – exception might be Cainhurst Castle, since you can look up and see most of the upper structures you’ll go on to explore – so even that doesn’t work as a catch-all positive.
lmk when you intend on doing this for sure