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Is it me, or are there more bonfires than you really need in this game? For example, the Twin Dragonriders are sandwiched between two bonfires for no real reason. Not only that but there are less useful shortcuts. Heck, that one shortcut in the copse has a bonfire on both sides of it. It's not really an issue for me, but it is odd.
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May 25, 2014 06:51
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Ice_Mallet posted:Is it me, or are there more bonfires than you really need in this game? For example, the Twin Dragonriders are sandwiched between two bonfires for no real reason. Not only that but there are less useful shortcuts. Heck, that one shortcut in the copse has a bonfire on both sides of it. Originally bonfire placement was going to be pretty scarce and you'd just unlock physical shortcuts to the boss and stuff ala DeS, at some point they went "gently caress it" and just planted bonfires every 30 steps for convenience' sake. It ends up working out nicely and makes ascetics more forgiving but, yeah, there's a lot of pointless physical shortcuts.
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May 25, 2014 06:54
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RBA Starblade posted:Soul greatsword stops being useful at about the same time the others do. It's really easy to dodge if you know what the animation for it is. Soul Greatsword comes out really fast and has a huge range, you use it to punish rolls. It's actually not bad at all.
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May 25, 2014 06:56
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I imagine a lot of those bonfires are just because of the Ascetic mechanic forcing them to divide up what those bonfires cover.
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May 25, 2014 06:58
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Ice_Mallet posted:Is it me, or are there more bonfires than you really need in this game? For example, the Twin Dragonriders are sandwiched between two bonfires for no real reason. I did not find that first (hidden) bonfire, my first time thru. I also missed the one on top of the Medusa lady. A lot of areas ended up feeling like the run to the spider. Once you know where all of the bonfires are though, it does make it a lot easier. Knowledge is power, I guess.
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May 25, 2014 07:07
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Stop ignoring your phantoms spamming 'I wont bite!'! 
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May 25, 2014 07:10
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Kaldaris posted:Soul Greatsword comes out really fast and has a huge range, you use it to punish rolls. It's actually not bad at all. yeah I've ended up using it when someone starts rolling and it almost always gets them when the animation finishes.
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May 25, 2014 07:11
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May 25, 2014 07:11
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Kaldaris posted:Soul Greatsword comes out really fast and has a huge range, you use it to punish rolls. It's actually not bad at all. This is exactly what it's for. You bait them into rolling towards you with soul spear, then slap them for getting too close with soul greatsword. That or you just step near them and they panic-roll from you. I think it does more damage the closer they are to you though?
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May 25, 2014 07:13
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Ice_Mallet posted:Is it me, or are there more bonfires than you really need in this game? For example, the Twin Dragonriders are sandwiched between two bonfires for no real reason. Not only that but there are less useful shortcuts. Heck, that one shortcut in the copse has a bonfire on both sides of it. The extra bonfires are mostly to facilitate using Bonfire Ascetics. Drangleic Basement respawns the Watcher & Defender and Nashandra. The hidden bonfire right before the Dragonriders them respawns them. The Bonfire right after respawns the Looking Glass Knight. It's stuff like that.
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May 25, 2014 07:18
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Basically, if you're being stupid and obvious with your spells, you're going to get hit, so don't be stupid and obvious.
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May 25, 2014 07:18
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Inspector_666 posted:I think the Harvest Valley/Earthen Peak transition/connection is cool, but yeah, it's pretty brown. Pretty sure its called Harvest Valley in reference to all the mining done there. That definitely wasn't the first thing I thought of when I heard the name. When I heard it mentioned in the thread it was usually in regards to the location of the sunbro covenant. So I was picturing this big bright forest filled with autumn trees and an orchard similar to the Oolacile Garden in Dark Souls. I thought it would be a nice pretty place. I was horribly wrong. I do actually like the area though. Yeah its desolate but that's the point. Those kind of areas work fine when the game doesn't contain a ton of them. The gimmicks of Harvest Valley aren't even that bad. The poison is very manageable and barely have to deal with the sludge. What's more interesting is dealing with the narrow pathways and corridors you constantly have to fight in due to the layout of Earthen Peak. Going through a vertical level is a nice change of pace. The only part I don't like is the windmill because, as has been addressed many times, it makes no goddamn sense. If the whole game looked like Harvest Valley then I'd hate it but I can tolerate those areas when designed well and limited to a small dose. Speedrunning that area is actually remarkably fast. Earthen Peak itself takes about five minutes to go from top to bottom if you ignore all the loot and take the correct path up.
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May 25, 2014 07:29
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It's called Harvest Valley in the middle of a lovely poison land because that's what they're harvesting. The poison. The windmill powers a pump to bring it up the tower where it's turned into a liquid and then prepared for Mytha's poison bath. That's why burning the windmill makes that fight a lot easier. (Windmills can power pumps. It makes sense, it's just completely unintuitive.)
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May 25, 2014 07:34
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Space Hamlet posted:Like I said, I can easily believe that it was the intention. My problem with the world design isn't exactly that it's not interconnected - my problem is that if spatial impossibility was a theme, it fails to be clear that it was anything other than a mistake. In short, it doesn't do anything with the idea, and it comes off as an excuse for having areas which don't make sense. Trading the incredible love and attention that went into designing Lordran for a half-baked visual motif which most players think (possibly correctly!) is a blatant error was not a good exchange, no matter how cool it might have been. After going through the whole game not once did I ever think you were supposed to be going insane because you're hollow or whatever. I just thought the graphics looked bad, because usually when a game's visuals suffer there's not some clever subversive meaning behind it, they just look bad. That's it. The idea simply isn't communicated in any way. I normally don't care about this kind of thing but it bothered me a lot because I thought Dark Souls 1 looked so much better. The textures looked a lot sharper and there was almost always cool stuff to look at outside of the level area. Because what you were looking at was another complete area, it would be detailed and look really pretty with the depth of field fuzz. In Dark Souls 2 if you look out of bounds in most areas, there's just a really ugly flat texture and maybe some basic details (try looking down in the Guardian Dragon's arena and tell me those cardboard trees aren't flat out awful). It sounds incredibly bitchy but I think it's a really fair complaint, because From showed they could do way better in two games already (particularly Dark Souls 1 though since it was connected). The world and atmosphere was just a really strong point of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1. The areas in Dark Souls 2 were also a lot smaller in general. For example Aldia's Keep looked awesome and then turned out to just be a big straight hallway, and the Gutter and Black Gulch were very short and uninteresting (there's lots of other possible examples). Basically the new cloth physics, character customization and 60 FPS of Dark Souls 2 were big improvements but I thought the graphics and presentation of the first two games had way more love put into them.
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May 25, 2014 07:36
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Mighty Dicktron posted:The extra bonfires are mostly to facilitate using Bonfire Ascetics. Drangleic Basement respawns the Watcher & Defender and Nashandra. The hidden bonfire right before the Dragonriders them respawns them. The Bonfire right after respawns the Looking Glass Knight. Do you have any idea how to get those two Pursuers to show up in the throne room? Or is that a NG+ only deal?
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May 25, 2014 07:42
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Gestalt Intellect posted:
I think Demon's Souls and the first Dark Souls is generally more interesting to look at artistically but I don't think its graphics were technically better than this game by any stretch. Demon's Souls in particular looks really dated when you go back to it. Cardboard Box fucked around with this message at 07:45 on May 25, 2014 |
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May 25, 2014 07:43
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Doflamingo posted:Do you have any idea how to get those two Pursuers to show up in the throne room? Or is that a NG+ only deal? Drangleic Basement. First bonfire in Drangleic Castle. Burn an ascetic there and they show up in the throne room.
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May 25, 2014 07:44
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I'm starting a new character as a lightning slinger. Right now I'm agonizing over which chime to upgrade. I currently have the starter chime, the archdrake chime from Felkin, and the idol's chime from Licia. At 30 faith (+1 from Licia's hood), the idol's chime gives me the most lightning damage despite its D scaling - but it also has terrible casting speed, I guess. What should I do?
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May 25, 2014 07:46
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Fister Roboto posted:I'm starting a new character as a lightning slinger. Right now I'm agonizing over which chime to upgrade. I currently have the starter chime, the archdrake chime from Felkin, and the idol's chime from Licia. At 30 faith (+1 from Licia's hood), the idol's chime gives me the most lightning damage despite its D scaling - but it also has terrible casting speed, I guess. What should I do? None of the Above. The Priest's Chime acquirable in Lost Bastille is leaps and bounds better than any of those for lightening hucking.
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May 25, 2014 07:47
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Yes, you should definitely go grab the Priest's Chime from Bastille (after Sentinels, under the Servant's bonfire, if I recall correctly)
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May 25, 2014 07:55
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Personally I feel as though the level design from a gameplay perspective was absolutely stellar and frankly nothing short of amazing. They're really, really well designed from that perspective. But I don't think dark souls 2 has the same atmosphere. I don't think it has the same... ]weight that dark souls 1 did. Dark souls 1 was heavy. It had meaning and even if that atmosphere got crushing at times I can remember literally every level from it with perfect clarity. And I do mean every level, every single stage. There were a couple that were boring as sin - the Valley of Drakes, that first big area of Oolacile. Demon Ruins was probably the only one that was outright bad. The Depths too, for that matter. But despite being poor from a gameplay perspective Lost Izalith was actually fascinating as an aesthetic element and as a lore element in the game. Dark Souls 2 doesn't have that weight. It doesn't have that atmosphere.. Dark Souls 2 is I wanna say similar to an entire game of Valleys of Drakes. Not in terms of the actual design, but I more mean the... style of it. There's nothing interesting that's done with it, not like Sen's or Anor Londo or heck, even Duke's or the Undead Burg! if I had to choose my favourite area in Dark Souls 1 I couldn't tell you, and if I did it'd be a five way tie between Anor Londo, Firelink, and then the Undead Burg and Parish and Asylum. In Dark Souls 2 I don't think I'd be able to tell you, and not because I'm spoiled for choice but because nothing stood out. Maybe the Undead Crypt, maybe Vendrick. The music for that fight was fantastic, and obviously reminiscent of Gwyn, which was similarly incredible. But even that just revealed how good the soundtrack everywhere else could have been, but wasn't. Maybe the Forest of Fallen Giants because heck, the geography there was interesting, but that was probably about the only area where I felt that to be true. On the other hand, multiplayer is amazing. Hackers are few and far between and the covenants are balanced and they are beyond fun. You'd never see anything like the ratbros in DS1! And the bellkeepers work in this game, and they're a ton of fun. The mechanics are simpler and make more sense and are way more balanced. There's a ton of new things you can do with the game and breaking the sword and board style that dominated dark souls 1 was a brilliant gameplay move. In terms of actually playing the game, Dark Souls 2 is way better, there's no denying that. The fact multiplayer works is awesome, though the lack of being able to send messages is not. Seriously though, the entire game is really well done in terms of level design and gameplay and multiplayer and all around fun. But it doesn't have the atmosphere that dark souls 1 had. It's not as memorable. It's a lot more fun, but a lot less filled with meaning. That's a big loss, I think. tl;dr I think Dark Souls 2 is a lot more fun to play. The multiplayer is awesome, the series of NG+ is awesome. It's a ton of fun. But ultimately I think I preferred Dark Souls 1. I don't know if I would call it the better game, or even the better story! I actually thought that the story of Dark Souls 2 was really good, Nashandra aside. But I think that Dark Souls 1 was still better in that unquantifiable way. I don't know how to say it any way other than that. There's just something about Dark Souls 1 that's lacking in the sequel. And that, I think, is a true loss.
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May 25, 2014 07:56
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Cat Army 
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The only thing better for lightning is the Dragon Chime and that's practically endgame.The Iron Rose posted:There's just something about Dark Souls 1 that's lacking in the sequel. And that, I think, is a true loss. Similarly, for me nothing in either of the DkSes tops the Storm King from Demon's in sheer loving awe. Runa fucked around with this message at 07:58 on May 25, 2014 |
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May 25, 2014 07:56
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Bobnumerotres posted:Yeah he has that one hex (that you of course can't get yourself) that is just absurd but otherwise the dude is really easy. drat you, now I have to see if the game has data that would allow me to cast it. Navlaan is human, so I don't see why not. What does it look like, so that I know?
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May 25, 2014 07:58
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Kaldaris posted:None of the Above. Nahxela posted:Yes, you should definitely go grab the Priest's Chime from Bastille (after Sentinels, under the Servant's bonfire, if I recall correctly) I had a feeling it was going to be this, but I loving hate fighting the sentinels 
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May 25, 2014 07:58
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Fister Roboto posted:I had a feeling it was going to be this, but I loving hate fighting the sentinels https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FTzrRouG_w
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May 25, 2014 08:00
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No one can design Dark Souls right. No one can criticize Dark Souls right. No one can play Dark Souls right.
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May 25, 2014 08:01
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Fister Roboto posted:I had a feeling it was going to be this, but I loving hate fighting the sentinels Need a co-op buddy?
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May 25, 2014 08:02
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Fister Roboto posted:I had a feeling it was going to be this, but I loving hate fighting the sentinels You can actually go around them, just so you know ... ! If you beat the Pursuer and take his route to Lost Bastille, you can grab the antiquated key from the Tower Apart bonfire. (It's before you enter Lucatiel's tower.) From there, you can open a door near the first courtyard you came into from the Exile's Holding Cells, the path is pretty clear from there, but it does take you behind the Ruined Sentinels.
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May 25, 2014 08:05
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Kaldaris posted:You can actually go around them, just so you know ... ! Take note that this requires a Lockstone.
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May 25, 2014 08:08
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Kaldaris posted:You can actually go around them, just so you know ... ! I know! But unfortunately you do need to fight the sentinels to get to the servant's quarters bonfire, which is my objective here.
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May 25, 2014 08:14
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I'm not sure why, but the multiplayer is forcing my soundcard's auto-volume-adjust to drop everything that isn't DS2 to barely audible levels. I'm guessing it's the (disabled) microphone feature. It's a really useful glitch, though! With my music dropping as soon as another player connects, I can hear several seconds before an invasion happens, and I can hear whenever I'm summoned to bellbro while alt-tabbed.
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May 25, 2014 08:16
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Fister Roboto posted:I know! But unfortunately you do need to fight the sentinels to get to the servant's quarters bonfire, which is my objective here. The other easy way is to don a redeye ring and a greatshield and let your phantoms do the work while they wail on you. 
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May 25, 2014 08:17
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Gimbal lock posted:I'm not sure why, but the multiplayer is forcing my soundcard's auto-volume-adjust to drop everything that isn't DS2 to barely audible levels. I'm guessing it's the (disabled) microphone feature. It's a really useful glitch, though! With my music dropping as soon as another player connects, I can hear several seconds before an invasion happens, and I can hear whenever I'm summoned to bellbro while alt-tabbed. 1) Go to control panel. 2) Go to sounds. 3) In the upper right, go to communications 4) Do Nothing
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May 25, 2014 08:18
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Kaldaris posted:1) Go to control panel. Oho! Go figure. I'm going to keep it on, however. It's far too useful. Glad to know that it's actually a feature, though!
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May 25, 2014 08:23
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Gimbal lock posted:Oho! Go figure. I'm going to keep it on, however. It's far too useful. Glad to know that it's actually a feature, though! Windows seems to like treating it like a skype call at any rate.
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May 25, 2014 08:24
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The Iron Rose posted:tl;dr I think Dark Souls 2 is a lot more fun to play. The multiplayer is awesome, the series of NG+ is awesome. It's a ton of fun. But ultimately I think I preferred Dark Souls 1. I don't know if I would call it the better game, or even the better story! I actually thought that the story of Dark Souls 2 was really good, Nashandra aside. But I think that Dark Souls 1 was still better in that unquantifiable way. I don't know how to say it any way other than that. There's just something about Dark Souls 1 that's lacking in the sequel. And that, I think, is a true loss. I think the word you're looking for is "gravity." The interconnected world design wasn't just a nifty hat trick with a lot of wow-factor - although it certainly had that going for it. It also helps sell the idea that you're in a world which was, at some point, alive. The different areas are related to one another inextricably. New Londo has a relationship with the Undead Burg. Blight Town has a relationship with Anor Londo. The Valley of Drakes even connects to Ash Lake via that huge cliff where you fight Leroy in the Tomb of the Giants, which links those two areas in a very logical way, and what player is even going to notice that? Even if you're not an expert on the lore, those connections convey a sense of baggage, and hint at the theme of power imbalance which unites the narrative. Dark Souls was a real piece of work, I tell ya
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May 25, 2014 08:35
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I agree and I think it actually saved From a lot of work by making the world visible from everywhere. In Dark Souls 2 they had to make a bunch of really bad looking backgrounds for each area, but in Dark Souls 1 they could just use the other areas that were already there as backgrounds. Probably took a lot of effort to shape the world like that, but I bet it still saved effort. Somehow, Dark Souls 2 has both way shorter transitions between areas while it also doesn't let you see them from each other. It all felt like they had a bunch of unrelated environments they wanted to put in the game and just sort of tried to stick them together.
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May 25, 2014 08:39
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It must have been a real pain in the rear end to make. "Hey George, it turns out that I don't need 250 meters for the parish. I'm removing 50 meters from the layout, thanks for moving Darkroot Garden." "Hey Bob, Dan asked me to move Darkroot Garden 50 meters, mind nudging the basin?" "Oh great, now Havel's tower doesn't align anymore. Steve, help me out!" Etc, etc...
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May 25, 2014 08:48
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I don't need anything for fashion souls but my face!
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May 25, 2014 08:53
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Seemingly the world of Dark Souls was so labor-intensive to put together properly that they had to skip some fairly important background visuals. People call attention to Izalith's black void problem a lot, but have you ever noticed these walls in the background of the Burg which just kind of stop? My guess is that they were meant to be Lordran's perimeter wall you can see in this image from the intro:  Would have been an impressive sight. Not that the Burg's visuals were left wanting, by any means: from this spot you get a nice view of the drake bridge, the first bell, Andre's little tower, Sen's Fortress, and the outer wall of Anor Londo. Really cool stuff. I just like Dark Souls a lot
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May 25, 2014 08:56
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