I can, briefly. If you look at a lot of PvP videos from 2 compared to 1 there’s a lot more time keeping one’s defenses up and circling around the opponent (for matches that lean on the side of physical weapons, anyway), waiting for them to make a move. I think three of the biggest changes that affect this dynamic – which come into play in the main game as well – are having less stamina to work with, being able to whiff backstabs (I’ve also found that it is generally harder to just loop around an opponent, not locked on, and backstab, compared to Demon’s and Dark), and not naturally having guaranteed invincibility during a portion of your roll animation. 2’s animations may be as fast or faster than the first game’s, but the way the actual combative interactions play out, with a human opponent or not, tend to be slower because there’s more to lose with swift, “reckless”, proactive playstyles, since those mechanical carryovers now come with caveats. I understand, or guess, that most of these changes were implemented to introduce new elements of complexity and risk, and they do introduce these elements, but the cost is boredom.
Even incidental PvP in ds2 benefits so much from this. I am in a parallel universe, it’s me
Even Garo couldn’t make DS2 PvP vids exciting . . . . . . .
I continue to feel like I played a completely different Dark Souls than everyone else on Selectbutton. I disagree with, uhhhh, literally everything you say.
Dark Souls 1 was only proactive in the sense that you had to keep your butt from being stabbed. That was it, that was the entire strategy. Parries could be done on reaction to any slow attack. Any. And you could roll-stab a lot of others on reaction! I should know, I did it a lot!
So all you did was have poking fests with katanas and straight swords, because anyone worth his salt would not open himself up to backstab or gamble on it.
Meanwhile, DS2: Parries could only be done proactively. Backstep was actually useful for anticipatory footsies. Rolls weren’t a get out of jail free. You didn’t have to constantly be on guard for the lagstab and could instead gamble on other things. Magic was actually useful in combat holy shit! So much more interesting stuff going on mentally. Two-handed weapons were both reasonably fast and could not be parried.
A caveat here is I’m thinking of 1v1 duels and not 1vmany.
I think it’s fairly non-contentious that, at a surface level (and at a deeper one in at least some respects, e.g. hitboxes), DkS2 feels significantly more gormy, compared to its historically non-gormy predecessor. I can absolutely believe that people who are really into fightmans could find a lot more to like in 2 despite initial impressions (clumsier movement doesn’t preclude better balancing), but it doesn’t seem contentious that anyone who doesn’t approach the game like a fightman (myself included) would just completely miss that.
I am definitely in the “only interested in incidental PvP, and don’t really care if it’s fair” set, so 2 is uneqivocally worse to me, but by no means terrible, like sleepy said
controversial(?) opinion: demons and bloodborne are the only two i’d consider essential despite spending a lot of time with the whole series. dark1’s level design kind of falls apart in the latter third and 2&3 are a slog compared to how quick yet substantial demons feels.
bloodborne plays the best of any of them tho and if i had to pick 1 to recommend that would be it. the streamlining of gear to 15 distinct styles and the irrelevance of wonky stat stuff like poise and agility were a boon and the visual design is astounding
yeah, i’ll accept that incidental pvp is likely worse for most players and accentuates skill level differentials harshly.
but, what bothers me is, like… tbh i had so much fun with my shithead blue invader in ds2 even in group sessions. left-hand invis ring and hybrid melee/spellcasting build made for all kinds of fun mindgames as nobody knew what the hell i was going to do and i could feint my timing in all kinds of goofy ways so you couldn’t play on reaction. you had to proactively guess what i was going to do if you wanted to beat me.
none of that would have been possible in ds1’s system, where if you try to get fancy, people just poise through you and backstab you. like, the idea that ds2 is the more reactive game is just so completely wrong it confuses me.
(garo is cool but the vast majority of his footage is him showing off against not-great players, hitting-and-running with parries/stabs and running about until they run out of resources)
I would be inclined to agree except that I don’t think dark’s last third being pretty weak outweighs:
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it having some of the only successful/interesting numbers going up of the whole series (bloodborne regressed on this and estus), and the most fun breadth of magic and everything else
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by far the best (and only essential) DLC of the series (which goes some way to making up for lost izalith)
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as with the magic/gear/leveling, probably the chewiest and most interesting world and NPC cast; demon’s and bloodborne are a lot more hostile and narrow (though absolutely successful in this)
I guess if everyone’s going to say the same thing they always say I’ll join the party and say lost izalith and the last third of dks1 owns forever
The true curse of the undead
IMO your list misses the real reasons why DkS1 is the best one.
- Most inspired art direction. Very lacking in consistency of palette or tone compared to the other games, but makes up for it with so much freshness and variety and subtly resonant things and spaces. There’s the sock-puppet-based Frampt, bizarro armor sets like Smough’s, and sudden breakouts of the sublime like Ash Lake and Anor Londo.
- Vertiginous verticality. The vertical layout is the real key to why it feels the most interconnected. It resonates with the gods-and-demons theming, and allows for false ceiling area reveals (crucial to the sense of mystery).
- Best script
- Perfectly willing to be cruel/unfair for the sake of being mysterious and cool. Demon’s has this too, but DkS1 does it more effectively IMO. Examples includes cursing (both the mechanic itself and the interaction with the ghosts), skeletons waking up, dying at New Londo boss room without Abyss ring, and certain thematically appropriate difficulty spikes like Capra Demon, the black knight archers and the skeleton wheels.
I mean, hell, as one random example which is not praised very often. Lower Undead Burg. What a goddamn den of thieves all backstabbing and parrying you, and dogs stunlocking you and chasing you up the stairs. Perfect synergy of challenge and theme. Try and complain to From that it’s kind of bastardish, they really do not care. And how beautiful it is that it’s right below the first level but you unlock it significantly later, and with the right fall you can sequence-break into it.
That level’s probably never before been mentioned as a reason to prefer DkS1, but think about it, what other level in the series tops it at the kind of thing it does? DkS1 is such a full and enriching experience because it has so many things like that.
ds1 has absolutely fantastic level design and the sequence breaking is great! it’s just that imo crystal cave of invisible floors and Angkor Wat But Demons don’t compare well to the rest of it?
maybe i should give it another go with fresh eyes, it’s been a minute and i may be forgetting good bits
[quote=“physical, post:94, topic:4251, full:true”]
ds1 has absolutely fantastic level design and the sequence breaking is great! it’s just that imo crystal cave of invisible floors and Angkor Wat But Demons don’t compare well to the rest of it?[/quote]
Yeah I’m actually on the last-third-of-DkS1-sucks team. I just think there’s so much value in the 2/3s that don’t suck (plus some value in the last third, particularly the concepts and filling-out-the-world-to-impressive-scale aspects) to make it still my favorite.
Crystal caves are like five mins long, idg how they can coalesce into a criticism of post-Lorddingdong stuff
tbh I do have a lot of stuff I want to say about Ds2 that’s ~67% novel and not all ‘[X] is Bad’ + ‘[Y] is Good’, but I’d rather wait for @meauxdal to stream so it can be a dialogue. Doubt that more than two people here have played it recently / are interested in it enough to have that be a maintainable discussion
Might as well link this article on DS3’s history/symbols I skimmed over recently, may interest some
Platonic first playthrough of crystal caves:
First time reach the end: die to clams
Second time: fight clams more carefully, die to them anyway
Third time: run past clams, one follows you in the boss room, die to clams
Fourth time: try fighting clams carefully again, die to last clam
Fifth time: run through to boss gate, realize with relief they can’t follow, finally start learning the fight
And this doesn’t particularly fall under my definition of unfair challenge which is cool or mysterious, although at least it is funny. And humor is another thing I should’ve mentioned on that list that DkS1 does the most and best
first one always felt sort of sterile to me in terms of enemy placement and moment-to-moment level navigation while 2 seemed a lot looser, probably due to having fewer fixed constraints (the life crystals, the bonfire warping, both of which break things up a lot) which meant they weren’t able to precision engineer the encounters to the same extent. a lot of what i liked about demon’s souls was the way that the intense parts were spread out and varied with kind of indeterminate open zones which were more about getting your bearings or exploring and preparing for the next round of the encounter-design moments (especially getting a feel for these as against the comparatively low-stakes background of just having to manage one or two guys wandering around corridors) than challenge per se. thinking of the weirdly large amount of places in that game where it was perfectly viable to just hang back and snipe everything while you were out of range, or at least using ranged attacks to manage them in general. so i think what i liked about that game was the sense of The Real Demon’s Souls being mostly something you tried to elide and circle around and mitigate, which also made it more exciting in all those sections where that got taken away and you just had to plough through. ds1 felt more about just ploughing through, constantly, as the default, and then only figuring out the workarounds in retrospect. like you had a lot of the same tools (sword, bow, mvmt, etc) but the range of ways that you could use them felt drastically circumscribed.
level design in ds2 was mostly bogus and it turns into true slog (especially harvest valley, which had me pumped for some kind of weird mutant pastoral from the title alone but which more or less turned out to be a shadowman 64 level) but there was still a sense throughout of giving you slightly more tools than you needed to do your job which made it less, uh, Mario Mod feeling for me overall (in sense of things that string together lots of “interesting decisions” but without as much sense of contextualising or pacing them). the only place ds1 came close to that for me was anor londo (which was more self-contained and deliberately paced than most parts of that game) and uh lost izalith which is maybe also why i always felt fond of that part even aside from it being basically a user-made age of mythologies map which just got dropped into the game??
people who have gone back to dks2 recently, should i be going og or scholar?
i have a lot of fond memories from this game playing it on release, but i feel like i’m just forgetting most of the bits i didn’t like. the main criticism off the top of my head is the fractured feeling world design and the addition of the adaptability stat and how that affected the rest of the ~game feel~
but I’m one of those two people and I probably won’t be able to be around for the stream. accommodate me at all times okay
scholar:
- 9999x faster loading iirc
+/- other people are still playing it
+/- comes with dlc areas packed in
+/- looks a lot better except when it looks a lot worse
+/- contentious but interesting (?) new enemy placement
can’t think of much reason to play vanilla again unless you were especially interested in digging deep into comparing them side by side. if nothing else some of the novelty should keep you on your toes even as you start to remember things as you play. you may not agree with everything they did but I wouldn’t consider either version Definitive so you may as well have experienced both
i guess my thing against scholar from what i’ve seen is the new enemy placement seems very much intended as a thing for people who have already played through vanilla. it seems like a huge missed opportunity to not just have both options available.
i never played the dlc either so having that there is probably worth it alone, and the ease of playing on ps4.