Love the game, but I also love Dark Souls 2.
Was wondering why Dark Souls 2 Is loathed by some fans and Dark Souls 3 is venerated by the those same fans?
Love the game, but I also love Dark Souls 2.
Was wondering why Dark Souls 2 Is loathed by some fans and Dark Souls 3 is venerated by the those same fans?
Dark Souls 2 was made by a separate team and in many ways seems to completely misunderstand what made Dark Souls good. Dark Souls 3 also does to a certain extent (the level design was, in certain ways, more similar to Dark Souls 2 than 1, for example) but it is much more in line with the first game.
As for me personally (stepping out of any pretense of objectivity here) I just thought Dark Souls 2 felt somewhere between an elevated fangame and a soulless cash-grab. It seemed to think that Dark Souls was cool and popular because it was hard and you die a lot, so the best way to make a level in Dark Souls 2 is to make sure the player will die a lot and find the experience frustrating. I'm sure many of the fans of the original game will agree with me when I say that that is not why Dark Souls was cool and popular. Dark Souls was cool because every time you die, you know exactly why. You fucked up the timing, you didn't pay attention to what the environment was trying to convey to you, you didn't react fast enough, you made a mistake. The vast majority of the times I died in Dark Souls 2, until playing it for hundreds of hours and knowing all the ins and outs, I would just stare blankly at the screen and go, "Okay, yeah, I guess the game just wanted me to die. Fair enough."
If I want to play that kind of game, I'll play I Wanna Be The Guy. And don't get me wrong, I (being in the vast minority of people who live on this planet) like IWBTG and other unnecessarily, intentionally unfairly difficult games. But there's a place for them, and it's not in the Souls series.
I don't get the artificial difficulty complaint about dark souls 2, I don't know if the mechanics of it gel with me better than the other games but I didn't find any of the base game hard when compared with the rest of the series.
The thing about souls games, that DS 2 didn't understand, is that they aren't hard on purpose as a gimmick. The difficulty was part of the world building and immersion factor. The story was about a hostile and dangerous world and the game's difficulty reflected that. That's a major issue I have with the sequels that it never seemed to understand.
Fair enough . From Software games didn’t really click with me until bloodborne and then I went back and played 3 and the rest of the series.
I played scholar of the first sin and thought 2 was pretty good when played in that experience (not as good as the others, but still fun) however you could definitely tell Miyazaki was hardly involved, that’s very apparent.
Another reason that people like me who hated Dark Souls 2 loved Dark Souls 3 is because Dark Souls 3 shamelessly pandered to people like me. That game is absolutely steeped in "remember dark souls? you're so cool for having played dark souls enough to recognize this area/callback/character/lore." It gave the world and story set up by Dark Souls a conclusion that it absolutely never needed and that no one, not even Dark Souls fans like me, ever asked for. And it relegated the entire Dark Souls 2 section of the world to a tiny transitionary swamp right before they brought back motherfucking firelink shrine.
Lol I can imagine playing the game felt twice as awesome if you’d played and beaten Dark Sould 1 before 3. He’ll, Dark souls 3 is my favorite Dark souls game without even having played 1 first. I can only imagine how cool it was if you had thoroughly trounced Dark Souls 1
My fiancé wants to get me a Ps5 this Christmas (the digital one) and I’m very much looking forward to playing the Demon Sould remake. That’s the main reason I told her PS5 over a series console. Shit looks amazing
The dark souls 1 callbacks kinda made me dislike some of DS3 originally, I really didn't like the first game, (partly because of the pc port being awful), so when you like return to anor londo, I was like, "shit, here we go again!"
Same, except when I was like that, it was with a massive smile on my face.
But yeah, I definitely understand that people who didn't post on forums dedicated to dissecting Dark Souls lore before Dark Souls 2 was ever even thought up would be less amused by such pandering
I don't understand this take. How was DS2 any harder than DS1?
Horrible enemy placements, hollowing that reduces your health to half (ds1 doesn’t do this, ds3 has embers which just increase health by 30%), extremely low estus in the start meaning consumables are mandatory, enemies are just fast while the combat is slow so they can really surround you
Seems to me that Dark Souls 2 just tested crowd control as a skill more than DS1 did. Which seems fair to me? That's a valid skill to have in this sort of game.
I think combined with the agility mechanics especially early game fighting crowds is just not fun. They do lots of damage and stun you. Better to fight a few fewer enemies where tactics play more of a role as opposed to using cheesing as a strategy, imo, like in ds3 where you fight maybe two lothric knights at once who have varied and interesting moves
That's fair. And your point about Lothric Knights does make me realize something else- for the early game, they're a tough enemy that's also a lot of fun to fight, and I can't really think of any similar, particular enemy types in DS2 that I particularly like fighting. Like, there's very few enemies I can think of that I hate in particular, but a lot of the enemies just sort of merge together in my head. They're a bit samey, I guess.
And fair point about the early game. In part because of the Agility stuff and in part because of the level design, I've often said that DS2 is a reverse DS1. That is, in DS1, the first half is phenomenal and the second half sucks, but in DS2 it's mostly the opposite- I don't think the bad parts of DS2 are as bad as the bad parts of DS1, though.
Yeah, for me the early game of ds2 was just not fun especially because I started as deprived which was a mistake (I had beaten ds1 and ds3 before) because unlike the other souls games deprived gets literally nothing and I didn’t know about the hand axe so I had to do the whole area with a dagger. Besides that though just fighting enemies doesn’t feel that fun to me in ds2. I think ds2 had a lot of improvements over ds1 but in many ways it also got worse, so idk. I don’t hate the game, I just don’t like it as much as 1 and 3. Hopefully Elden ring will be a banger.
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