dark souls 3 is apparently on psn flash sale for $26 and i just finished bloodborne so uh hm.
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dark souls 3 is worth it for a few really great nuggets of stage design stuffed inside anā¦ unfinished whole
one of the endings is really great to me as well but iunno if itās enough to save it
DSII scholar is on sale for like ten bucks so iām thinkin it might be time to have a look
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When I first started playing Dark Souls I thought the Undead Burg would be the whole game.
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Thereās a lot of perspectives that shift in the light of ever contrasting DS 1-3. Iāve only played through 2 once, the others many times over. So I donāt recall itās depths nearly as well and Iām going to change my tune a little once I play Scholar.
To me though, 3 actually came off the most ācompleteā as a project, even with the usual mysteries and gaps in design or dev, intentional or not.
That might be a result of the tired, conclusive, sense behind it, but for all the ash and dust, it also showed some of the finest polish.
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Yeah, I canāt agree. Maybe DS3 suffers from turd-polishing syndrome. I mean, it certainly has the least mechanical jank and in some places has extremely good level design. Also, the one ending (linking the fire) is a small and short moment that is enormous in its import and irony and totally sells the thesisās of the game. itās super great. As a container of fiction, though, as a a place, ds3 is a lot of promise and little delivery. To me, it is rich with evidence of laziness, of cut corners and forgotten threads, feels ironically like Miyazaki and co absconded from their thrones and turned away from their duty before it was done.
Part of what makes souls games interesting in a narrative sense is the multitudes of tiny stories they contain, and how despite their small scale each of these stories are complete enough that putting them together like a jigsaw gives the world you traverse a sense of history. The tiny mysteries have weight to them. In DS3, despite the narrative emphasis on history (this extremely long, cyclical, and Sisyphean history,) there are ironically a wealth of beginnings to small stories and mysteries, but there are only a handful of them that are complete enough to seem like they might have, like, a point. the rest of them are incomplete and kind of inconsequential instead of mysterious and rich. Itās hyper focused on aldrichās arc (seasoned w/ lazy references to ds1) to the point where I sincerely think they ran out of time to plan the rest of the game.
And the mysteries and histories that they do attempt to build are cheap. frankly, that firelink shrine shit is a hard eyeroll in my book. Itās lazy. itās fake mystery. It has nothing to contribute to the gameās atmosphere as a whole except ironic novelty. itās confusing for confusionās sake. It doesnāt even seem like it was intended to be an ironic mystery or the red herring of a plot thread that it is, it just seems like they couldnāt communicate whatever they tried to communicate well enough to give it any narrative or emotional weight.
Itās like a conversation with a friend where they drop enough juicy secret convo bait that you need to say out loud āoh, now you have to tell meā and your friend just gets up and walks away and you never ever see them ever again, thatās what DS3 does over and over and over
āIronyā and ācheapā comes up a lot when I think about why this game is kinda meh, I guess thatās worth pointing out too.
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DS3 is like opening a Russian doll and finding a restaurant cheque and a mint inside of it instead of another doll
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get shrekt, PS2
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i wanted to talk about the Undead Burg as a first level in response to @BustedAstromech 's posts upthread, which ftr i thought were observant, cogent and well-informed. I could absolutely see where he was coming from, even if i mostly donāt agree.
When i first played Dark Souls (which for context i played before Demonās, back when 2 had just been announced) i found the burg incredibly grueling and difficult, to the point where it was almost demoralizing. Now itās routine and breezy; i can get from Firelink to Andre in about 10-15 minutes, easily. i think itās an incredibly elegant and fair level, and what makes it so hard for a first-timer is that itās more about teaching you how to play Dark Souls in a meta sense. Itās as much about how not to play, and what to do when you donāt succeed, as it is about showing you how to succeed.
i died so many times over at that first aqueduct encounter, in retrospect because i was doing things like trying to spam attacks, or rushing into the middle of the group and getting stunlocked. On that bridge encounter by the bonfire, if you say āfuck itā and just rush in, without the intimate knowledge of enemy placement that you get from repeated playthroughs you will get blasted apart and/or stabbed to death by like, four enemies at once. The whole burg level is telling you to slow the fuck down and pay attention, and that is almost literally all you need to do in order to succeed. The fixed, chesslike placement of enemies, their individual fragility (theyāre mostly only threatening in numbers) and their susceptibility to being pulled back through the level means that a slow, retreating approach works really well, and itās what the game is funnelling you toward. Even beating Taurus is based on pulling back, not just to use that tower but in the fight itself (itās very easy to beat Taurus by backpedaling out of his attack range on the bridge and stepping in to hit him, over and over).
The key point of contrast with 1-1 is that you have to clear 1-1 in order to progress the game, and there is no way to level out of it. You are being taught how to play Demonās Souls, and you must learn how to play, and demonstrate youāve learned, in order to progress. (And, weirdly for the series, you also have to go engage with the plot for a second ā i always forget the part where youāre expected to meet the Monumental before you can level up.)
In Dark Souls, for however much the Burg is a harder first level, you can always go back to Firelink and rest. You can go back and scrape together a level or two for more HP. You can explore and find the undead merchant, and get a shortbow and some chainmail armor with poise, and suddenly youāre doing a little better against basic mooks. You can go down to New Londo and fall in love with the estoc. Or take a risky dash through the graveyard and come out swinging a zweihander. You can cheese that first black knight with firebombs from the rooftops, and now youāre packing his big badass sword. Thereās a lot hidden just off the beaten path that can enable a player to completely crush the first few levels with little issue.
Dark Souls is built on strategic retreat and backtracking. āGo back to Firelinkā is so central to the game that you have to do it in order to see the final boss. That, plus the game is about player discovery and self-expression. By resisting your progress in the first areas, the game encourages you to engage with its macro-structure more and empower yourself by expanding your knowledge. ITāS SO GOOD!! FUCK!! NOW I REMEMBER WHY I LIKE THIS SERIES SO MUCH
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Yeah! Also the Undead Merchant sells the Reinforced Club which is a low-durability and overpowered weapon you can use to club through burg (and maybe they expected you to switch after that, but I had a run where I just kept using it the whole game).
For the slow, pick off strategy though, that applies much more strongly to 1-1 in some ways. An invisible but huge improvement in Dark Souls combat as opposed to Demonās is that Dark Souls has an aggro grouping system where waking one enemy always wakes all of its friends as well, and this is used by the Burg hollow teams. In Demonās, there is clearly an engine limitation where aggro is a cylinder around the player that always affects one enemy at a time. So most encounters in Demonās can be handled by inching forward, standing ground and cutting down, repeat. Only ranged enemies who themselves stand their ground complicate matters and force retreats or rushing forward in Demonās.
In Burg itās much more nuanced, you actually have to retreat into chokepoints to make this work. I had the strong intuition to try something like that after playing Demonās so that obviously helped me with Burg (which was still not a cakewalk though), even though my Demonās experience harmed me in other ways by making me devalue shields and misunderstand poise.
Youāre right that those encounters are designed to teach the player, but they are much compressed over similar encounters in Demonās 1-1. The grassy hill and aqueduct are beautiful, the archer bridge is functional, but my big concerns are the level post-bonfire, especially how it interacts with prior level content.
When I was analyzing these levels for lectures I started to compare the teaching relationship to Super Mario Bros. 1-1 next to SMB3ās 1-1; SMB3 holds many of the same lessons but compresses them in recognition of its carried audience. Those old games could rely on players replaying the beginning again and again to absorb lessons passed over too quickly, a feature modern games lack, but which is interestingly replicated by the Souls games high difficulty and insistence on repeating progress.
I like thinking about the game giving the player an option to retreat and alternate rather than locking them into Boletaria. That feels like a decision about pacing and narrative made for Demonās that they later realized wasnāt necessary. Beyond that initial Boletaria lock-in, though, Demonās is much more open in the front 40%.
Good catch on the aggro behavior, that continues to snare me as itās not foolproof ā you can certainly still Practice Safe Aggro Pulls in Dark but what you get feels more random. I think these half-measure to combat cheap play only increased variability until they fully committed to aggressive gameplay in Bloodborne, and built structures to support it.
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The dialogue between the player and the enemy AI has been getting richer and more nuanced with every game in the series, with more and more mutual understanding.
In Demonās, the player often seems to be ignoring and talking past the entire encounter design, using the exact same few magic phrases every time (aggro manip and stunlock). In DkS1, that can still happen, but the phrases vary and are more clever and need to be looked for. Sometimes the reverse happens too ā the enemies ignore what the player is trying to do and callously crush them.
By Bloodborne and DkS3, the dialogue persistently has a nuance that only happened serendipitously in DkS1 and Demonās. Each tactic that a player might try usually works to some degree and if executed well. Over time, the player will find enemies that require fresh thinking, and discover that as their precision improves, their interlocutorās likewise does. Enemies pause, sidestep, track your rolls, resist poise break, reach over your shield, cooperate in manageable groups. The player is carefully denied tools that would bust the maximum damage budget or manipulate aggro, except as very limited one-time items (e.g. in Bloodborne, pungent cocktail, invisibility and that one attack-each-other knife exist, but youāll only find a few, so using one is a careful decision that this is the best opportunity to do so in the entire game).
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Thatās interesting. In my mind those are very separated between āAI movement/aggro behaviorā and āAI attacksā. Iām going to have to think about the effect they have on players as a whole, and particularly when viewed without separation.
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Yeah, itās really inseparable. Thereās one remaining magic phrase that still works perfectly to talk past the entire non-boss encounter design in Bloodborne and DkS3. Itās the speedrunner running-past-everything, which doesnāt really require any skill aside for map knowledge (or situational awareness, on the first playthrough). And why does that work so well? Itās because every enemyās first attack always has a long windup. Itās also because enemies canāt outrun you after that. And itās because almost no enemy stands in a narrow enough space that they physically block you.
Presumably these enemy behaviors are conveniently universal because this makes them more fair opponents in a normal approach. But it can be exploited by a player interested in who they want to fight, not just how.
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thereās a big difference between enemy design and encounter design
itās why a lot of modern doom wads are really good at herding the player around with very simple, predictable, manageable ai patterns
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Right, the Souls games have struggled with players picking apart their encounter design due to holes left in certain tactics that they may or may not want to fix ā I have several friends who argue that they intentionally left ranged, magic, and pull techniques cheeseable as an out for the difficulty. I think the tradeoffs made in Bloodborne, restricted but sharpening the playerās palette, are worthwhile in allowing them to create better encounters.
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You can inch in DkS1 and still pull 1 enemy. You have to be a little.more csreful about it, yeah. Even in the burg, if you do it in reverse direction.
The burg from normal direction (coming from the bridge with the dragon) is about the only place in the game which can consistently force you into 2 or more enemies.
Demonās Souls is better about encounter design, with a lot less enemy designs. Especially once you get past the burg.
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welp i did it
emulator is kicked to the curb, love live the PS2
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Iām going to play this game on my PSTV and you are responsible
Shadow Tower is very intimidatingā¦
i forgot there was voice acting to begin with, so it was jarring and actually scary when a voice spoke to me suddenly out of the darkness while i was hacking away at jumping spiders and slimes
iām gonna play through it after i finish KF4. A Kingās Field game with survival horror style resource management is something i could easily take to. But itās so spooky
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also that youtube screencap definitely looks like an intimate look into a zombieās butthole, iām sorry
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