Sen’s Fortress might just be one of the best designed levels in game history, in my opinion.
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Man I love these posts and would say you should put them in a dedicated thread but then no one would read them except me 
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Ehh, it’s fine in the abstract, but Sen’s stretches the particular game’s core mechanics a bit too far IMO. The swinging blades on narrow paths create a really obnoxious camera problem. You need to angle the camera to get proper depth perception, but if you do, then you need to also walk at an angle and the camera keeps snapping back behind you automatically. And it’s so long you can’t get through unless you learn to manage this awkward camera minigame perfectly, which I don’t think Dark Souls is supposed to be about.
I think one of the hallmarks of Souls game level design is a willingness to push mechanics beyond a reasonable point, to be unfair and cheap, all in service of a memorable concept or emotion. It’s a much wider palette than the restricted set of balances mechanics most games allow to come from their levels.
It’s of a piece with their use of natural spaces for combat rather than cleaned-up, obstruction-free arenas like most action games.
(Sen’s is easily my favorite level in this game, which otherwise has very few levels I unreservedly love next to its stablemates)
Turn off “auto wall recovery” in the camera options. You will no longer fight the camera in tight spaces or delicate moments.
Sen’s has no flaws.
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The swinging blades also have big chunks of masonry taken out of the walkway to indicate the danger zones!
Sen’s is brilliant, it and Painted World are my favorite levels in the game. i still remember the first time i walked into the first swinging blade room and was like, “what the fuck, i can’t do this, are you kidding me??”
and now i can do the whole level no deaths without breaking a sweat lol
Painted World is perfectly dioramic, I literally want a tiny model of it for a shelf
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I’m sure you would appreciate the alternate history timeline this game has produced. Some of it I hadn’t seen before.
Granada survived from day 1! They’re colonizing my way now!! France used to be smaller and Great Britain had some of their mainland provinces, probably helped by that ginormous Aragon. France is now junior partner to Bohemia. Castile and Portugal both survive on some islands but no colonial nations of theirs. Tunis stole Crete and Cyprus that Ottomans would normally have at this point. Livonia exists!
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Painted World always felt sad as it was but a remnant of the looping, space-conserving level design featured all over Demon’s Souls. I would love it if I hadn’t expected the rest of Dark to be similar and had not been sorely disappointed.
tower of latria is the best shit
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Boletaria 1 is my shining ideal but I love it all so
I even love the way they’re still stuck in From’s ‘yon generic D&D’ aesthetic they’d been running since King’s Field 1, the last gasp of that enticing porridge.
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Boletaria is love.
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This game looks amazing. Is it still possible to download a demo of it anywhere?
i sort of think of Lordran as a world from Demon’s Souls, but scaled to be an entire game. kind of like as Riven is to Myst.
i mean it’s probably the fifth arch stone, right?
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I always thought Painted World was probably content cut from Demon’s Souls. It just feels so much like Demon’s Souls that it wouldn’t have been out of place as the fifth arch stone. I’ve never seen confirmation of this though.
drakengard 3 is, as the teens say, lit
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I don’t…think so? There’s a steam widget link I found while googling around: https://store.steampowered.com/widget/247890
That may lead to a demo but the last mentions of such a thing are around 2014 and there’s nothing on the main page. You may have to wait for a steam sale.
Also fuck Ming once again for a grindy war, necessary so that they lose mandate and become vulnerable for later fights. This is hampered by the fact that they started their Golden Age which makes their troops more on par with mine while already having 3x my force limit.
All Steam games are demos, you just have to return them before you play them for… 1 hour I think?
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It was the first vertical slice developed for Dark Souls. I doubt it’s cut content, but it was the very first level From built after Demon’s Souls was finished.
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