Fatigued Souls (Part 1)

Hahaha yesss

Honestly all of Darks 2 kind of vibrated with this

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i like the level design in ds2 by and large, but i also like a lot of the shadowman level design!

it reminds me of king’s field 3 and shadow tower even more than shadowman

It definitely looks like a Shadowman 64 level

which I think works as far as Shadowman 64 goes.

The comparison just reminds me of what I wrote in this piece.

Dark Souls II might’ve been better as a PlayStation/low-poly release. As I imagine it, this would’ve freed it from those attempts at glory and grandeur and let it fully express an underlying sour gloominess that Dark Souls and Dark Souls III seem unconcerned with, even among all their morbid curiosities. If you straight-up updated the first three King’s Field games for modern consoles, they would be utter bores (even King’s Field IV suffered a little by being on the PlayStation 2). They work within and with their technical limitations pretty well. Conversely, I think prior attempts to touch up Dark Souls II – graphical mods and the PlayStation 4 Scholar of the First Sin rerelease – only draw stronger attention to the very problems that are meant to be solved.

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it kind of rules that a thread about souls fatigue ends up being another example of infinite patience/fascination for talking about the series forever

this is selectbutton alright

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Dark Souls 2 (2014)

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btw @meauxdal i wanted to say that you’re not some weirdo out to sea alone with your opinion re: the thrill of combat that requires a high bar for meticulous performative excellence. i’m the hard-headed asshole whose first run through dark 2 was a no adp no hp no shield nightmare and it owned. i have a lot to say about my cognitive dissonance with the souls games and how i simultaneously like and question everything about them because i feel like almost nobody has developed a vocabulary for actually figuring out why they work and why prescriptivism should be as far away from that conversation as possible but i just deleted 9 million words about it because i don’t know how to say it nicely so rip

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i would love to read as many of those 9 million words as you are willing to blurt out

Should also note, this is the audience which’s probably most enjoyed the series’ DLC (post-Dark, anyway?). It didn’t even take a day for people to upload videos of themselves doing SL1 no-damage fights with the Ringed City’s bosses.

Beat most of it without too much trouble. Stuck on Midir. Don’t know how a Sorc is supposed to deal with an enemy with this many AoE attacks. Not a damage sponge.

i think the pinwheel theme is my favorite boss theme in dark 1, which is a shame because most players will barely get to hear it.

I am mostly done with the DLC I think?? I just have the daegon. I wanted uh…more references to the rest of the series. Interesting they would return it to one of the least liked areas of Dk2. Maybe there are more areas I am missing!

Every time I got summoned for that fight, I was immediately the target. That’s what I get for being a Miracle User in a miniskirt-heels and a witches hat. Sometimes the halter-top.

Currently unsure I’m interested in beating Midir. I figured out that Pestilent Mercury is the best Sorc option but the boss is still far more random than any of the strategies suggest. The flying three miles away from you is what frustrates me the most.

I enjoyed the environments of this new DLC quite a lot but it felt both a lot bigger (visually) and a lot smaller (physically) than I expected.

I hope whatever the next game is has Trick Weapons but retains shields (or some shield-like item). I’d very much like to see either a new King’s Field or a new IP that is cyberpunk inspired. Agree with most here though, I think Dark Souls has run its course.

Demon’s Souls still feels like the game that resonates most with me. Feels more haphazard, more like you might expect a city, rather than a city built to setup conflicts (as is the case with basically all the games that came after).

Yessirr

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Best thing in the DLC is probably the swish purple/white silk tunic thing off the church guy

not finished uploading yet, but here’s part 2

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No way! That looks pretty promising.

The Emotion Engine has finally been cracked?..

So, the people that dislike Lost Izalith… what is the reason?

To me it seemed like a pretty straightforward area. It wasn’t frustrating to navigate and it was thematically cool, perhaps not by itself but certainly in the context of the areas before and after it. It’s certainly no Sen’s Fortress, which oddly enough I don’t hear much criticism against despite being one of the weakest areas in the entire series.

As for the Crystal Caves, I love them in concept, but the execution is pretty poor. i have to agree with that.

For me personally it is that those floating demon guys who spray fire are so boring to fight. And the lava section post-patch is just run run run.

Worst part of Crystal Caves is how terrible to trees look at the entrance to the area

the emotion engine was in the PS2!

PS3 emulation was never impossible (the cell is quite well-documented and the graphics aren’t that exotic), just a pain in the ass because of how strange the architecture was. pretty much as of its release a lot of shader and vector logic was generally being handed off to GPUs (to a greater extent in the 360 than the PS3, even) but because Sony spent so much on R&D and wound up with this weirdly powerful multicore architecture (I think FP16 performance – which is not a common way to measure CPU power in 2017, which is the point, but still – is within 30% of the PS4 if all of the cell cores are used efficiently, which is potentially a tiny generational improvement) yet a middle of the road GPU, all that needed to happen was for clever enough recompilers to be written. I have no idea how much theoretical overhead remains for getting us to fullspeed on current desktop CPUs, but I absolutely expect it to happen.

  • although bear in mind that last gen was by far the most powerful that consoles have ever been relative to then-common PCs due largely to how much of a rut Intel was in compared to IBM.