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Remember, the B in B-Team stands for Best.
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May 14, 2023 19:20
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| # ? May 25, 2024 00:46 |
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irrc in the warp menu the icon for Earthen Peak actually has a volcano behind the windmill, which makes it even weirder/funnier that it's not there in any version of the actual game.
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May 14, 2023 21:27
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The cohesive and interconnected world of dks1 suddenly became it's most important and defining feature according to critics around when dks2 launched.
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May 15, 2023 00:11
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Alot of peoples criticisms of these games were news to me when i first heard them. Like the post lordvessel part of DS1 being a slog/bad. I never really felt that way on my playthrough of the game. Maybe if I was the type to playthrough it a million times Id have that problem (probably because you can't "sequence break" like you can in the 1st half of the game honestly). The only criticism of ds2 that felt a little justified was the vanilla games bosses being kinda meh, I think they are probably the weakest of the series.
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May 15, 2023 00:54
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i played ds2 through recently and the criticisms for me aren't difficult bosses are generally too easy until the DLC where they become fun not allowing us to run through paths to bosses and forcing enemies to be killed before fog walls too many enemies in general that were just boring and irrelevant boring environments it was still an ok experience
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May 15, 2023 00:55
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Scrree posted:irrc in the warp menu the icon for Earthen Peak actually has a volcano behind the windmill, which makes it even weirder/funnier that it's not there in any version of the actual game.  Warp menu icon has a mountain behind it, the actual ingame location has a volcano. 
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May 15, 2023 07:34
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It's always been in the back of my mind, but I've never put all the pieces together until now... Seems kind of obvious something's off when the towering windmill complex located in the shadow of a mountain/volcano is inexplicably called Earthen Peak, rather than the mountain itself. As it stands, there's really no need to delineate the ole poison mill from Harvest Valley in the first place and in-game there's zero transition from one to the other. You could excise the Earthen Peak name drop with no issue. And actually dang, that snow capped mountain was absolutely the place for cute li'l Shanalotte in her parka, wasn't it. Though now I also wonder if all of that could be fingerprints of the early time travel plot as well. You could've gone from Not-poison Valley to snowy mountaintops, then after some time fuckery oops the valley is poisoned and the mountain blew its top.
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May 15, 2023 09:15
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Metroid and Castlevania games rarely expose rooms to the sky because of this issue nobody cares about Underground Dungeon Logistics
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May 15, 2023 09:16
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In other news: quote:https://twitter.com/LordRadai/status/1657865395028602880 
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May 15, 2023 10:28
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giZm posted:Boss room is physically in the volcano behind poison mill, and Iron Keep is at the top of the volcano in the caldera. There, makes sense. This is how I always thought about it, never really scrutinized the skybox to see if it made sense because I just don't care that much.
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May 15, 2023 13:28
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 Todo: Darkstalker, Throne Watcher & Defender, Nashandra, Aldia Since the last three are back to back to back, can you bone out after you've defeated one of them and continue with the others later on?
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May 15, 2023 13:46
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Why would anything make sense in DS2? The world is about to end again, geography and time is completely wrecked. Humans are going hollow, and even the sane ones are so far gone they are all severe amnesiacs. Almost no one talks about the other strange elevator, you reach the top of Aldia's keep, step outside into the bright sunshine, take an elevator up to a floating rockscape full of dragons with a floating castle at the other end. None of this is visible from the ground, where it's permanent dusk and foggy.
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May 15, 2023 13:47
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Ya in ds3 they realized people needed their hands held so they just literally tell you that chunks of land are drifting towards lothric castle/firelink shrine.
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May 15, 2023 15:01
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It was disappointing going from 2 to 3 and having the story path be linear with like two side areas
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May 15, 2023 15:14
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Technically you can do Dancer early and go to Lothric Castle etc but it's a pain in the rear end.
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May 15, 2023 15:42
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axolotl farmer posted:Why would anything make sense in DS2? The world is about to end again, geography and time is completely wrecked. Humans are going hollow, and even the sane ones are so far gone they are all severe amnesiacs. The Aldia elevator is better sold. There’s windows in the shaft to get you used to the idea that you’re moving from one place to another. Fog on the ground but clear sky in the mountains(/infinitely tall stone pillars) also makes intuitive sense. There’s a couple of other zone transition elevators in the game that don’t effectively “foreshadow” where they’re taking you—Heide>Wharf, Drangleic>Amana, Amana>Crypt, probably others I forgot, but all empty shafts with no view of what’s coming. This isn’t unique to DS2 either, DS1 certainly has a few transitions like that. Point is just it doesn’t need to be a bad thing, every game has to cut a corner somewhere and DS2 more than most, and transitions between zones are an obvious place to do it. They just failed the laugh test on that one.
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May 15, 2023 16:29
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Honestly still astounded that for lack of a better solution the only reason why you can't just short-circuit like 2/3rds of DS3 is because a corpse won't spawn with a necessary key until you go defeat the other bosses first.
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May 15, 2023 16:30
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John Murdoch posted:Honestly still astounded that for lack of a better solution the only reason why you can't just short-circuit like 2/3rds of DS3 is because a corpse won't spawn with a necessary key until you go defeat the other bosses first. What key is that? Struggling to think of anything other than the Peculiar Doll from Pope-squad
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May 15, 2023 17:00
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heard u like girls posted:What key is that? Struggling to think of anything other than the Peculiar Doll from Pope-squad Archives key. Literally right in front of the door it’s for, too. The only way you’d ever even notice it existed is if you already sequence broke to do Lothric Castle early, which is why it’s such a kick in the nuts.
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May 15, 2023 17:04
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skasion posted:Archives key. Literally right in front of the door it’s for, too. Ahhhh yeah that is pretty dumb, forgot all about that. In other news our boy Mati finished his DS2 playthrough last week and is starting DS3 now  )https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTGQ-QX7zJ8
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May 15, 2023 17:07
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I full cleared ds2 on pc recently, had a lot of fun. Kept my spare time occupied for a while. Went all the way through to plat, and picked up dual eleum loyce swords - I'm usually not much for the curved swords, but it seemed like those would be good - and indeed they were well worth. I'd previously cleared the game on ps3, and platted it but that was before the dlcs. A few parts of the dlcs, and game are much more tedious than ds3 or the other games, except maybe Bloodborne if you get way into the dungeons. But yeah. Good game, doubt that I'd ever have a spot to spend that much time again to clear it like this again after, but it's nice to have this character to refer back to now.
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May 15, 2023 19:12
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heard u like girls posted:Ahhhh yeah that is pretty dumb, forgot all about that.
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May 15, 2023 19:19
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John Murdoch posted:Honestly still astounded that for lack of a better solution the only reason why you can't just short-circuit like 2/3rds of DS3 is because a corpse won't spawn with a necessary key until you go defeat the other bosses first. There's a whole bunch of stitch marks woven throughout DS3. My intuition is that they intended to have a much more open-ended layout that had to get shoved together for reasons of time and budget, resulting in a more linear path of progression. The Abyss Watchers having a secret sliding panel that leads to a bunch of catacombs that then lead to Irithyll never made much logical or thematic sense, and the Cathedral of the Deep being a pure dead end that's nonetheless necessary to complete to get to Irithyll is a jarring cut in the game's overall flow. The Catacombs leading into the Demon Ruins and then the Profaned Capital makes more thematic sense, assuming that it's intended to be tied to the legacy of Lost Izalith, and I can easily see a different branch leading off to Irithyll in its stead. Keeping the game too open with a reduced scope could lead to players running into the Grand Archives early, finishing off the Twin Princes, and then having the far more underwhelming Profaned Capital and Anor Londo segments creating an inverted sense of escalation. Vermain fucked around with this message at 19:36 on May 15, 2023 |
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May 15, 2023 19:34
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165 deaths later a lie remains a lie. Thanks for coming to my TEDx talk y'all.
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May 15, 2023 20:38
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giZm posted:165 deaths later a lie remains a lie. Congrats on going with the Good Ending (tm).
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May 15, 2023 20:40
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FishMcCool posted:Congrats on going with the Good Ending (tm).
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May 15, 2023 21:02
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SLOSifl posted:Yes! He's gonna love it after coming from DS2. That was a great playthrough though. Agreed, im very excited. Just came back from werk, gonna watch it now hell yea
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May 15, 2023 23:44
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Will always love this old Lore video from before the dlc dropped just going WHO IS ALDIA!? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VdKpbOHQ3M
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May 16, 2023 04:01
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MonsieurChoc posted:Will always love this old Lore video from before the dlc dropped just going WHO IS ALDIA!? it's fun to sort the comments by newest and see just how many times the OP responds to someone telling him he got it wrong
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May 16, 2023 04:37
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Vermain posted:There's a whole bunch of stitch marks woven throughout DS3. My intuition is that they intended to have a much more open-ended layout that had to get shoved together for reasons of time and budget, resulting in a more linear path of progression. The Abyss Watchers having a secret sliding panel that leads to a bunch of catacombs that then lead to Irithyll never made much logical or thematic sense, and the Cathedral of the Deep being a pure dead end that's nonetheless necessary to complete to get to Irithyll is a jarring cut in the game's overall flow. The Catacombs leading into the Demon Ruins and then the Profaned Capital makes more thematic sense, assuming that it's intended to be tied to the legacy of Lost Izalith, and I can easily see a different branch leading off to Irithyll in its stead. Keeping the game too open with a reduced scope could lead to players running into the Grand Archives early, finishing off the Twin Princes, and then having the far more underwhelming Profaned Capital and Anor Londo segments creating an inverted sense of escalation. Yeah it's been a minute but I remember someone saying originally the Catacombs were supposed to be under the Greatwood arena or something like that. Combined with how pretty much every single boss got changed or shuffled around somehow it paints a picture of a game wildly in flux during development. Also I always hated the teleport yank back to Lothric immediately after killing the last pre-Princes lord. Another blunt and weird choice to keep the player on track.
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May 16, 2023 16:23
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John Murdoch posted:It probably also helps that From kept iterating and experimenting all the way up to Elden Ring. DS2 being some terrible departure from DS1 in increasingly forgotten ways is a drop in the bucket compared to how different BB, Sekiro (which can be argued isn't even a Souls game, it's that different), or ER are to DS1. There were a mix of factors involved, I think. -There was a legit rug pull around the darkness and graphics in the vanilla DS2 game at-release because apparently they could never get the engine to work the first time around. People were justifiably annoyed at that. Scholar of the First Sin has a better lighting engine and it fixed that issue. -There were some legit bullshit things that were patched over time, like that one Drakekeeper knight with the big 2-handed mace whose attack animations were bugged, which were eventually patched. -People were annoyed with the despawning mechanic because originally there was no way to respawn besides the bonfire ascetics. This was patched later so that being in the Covenant of Champions respawns basic mobs. -The miracle nerf was pretty bullshit. Miracles were OP to start with, then they overcorrected and nerfed them into the ground. There was a wider issue where they clearly didn't consider the magic-typed defenses of most enemies in the base game anyway, but miracles were definitely the strongest. They just ended up repeating the mistakes of DS1 ultimately, where magic is strong in the base game and then the DLCs feel like a brick wall by comparison. -DS2's base game does have some generally stupid bosses (one-note, very easy to beat) in the middle and end. I think you can tell they didn't have time to really flesh those ones out or make them fun. -There's also a pretty consistent "Second Souls Game" feeling where your first playthrough of the next game you pick up often feels a lot easier than the first one you played through. I know I felt it between Demon's Souls and DS1, but that was a lot less common than DS1 to DS2. -Nobody knowing how Adaptability worked or how vital it was made the game feel so much worse to play at release. -Soul memory ends up functioning about the same as using the character's level for matchmaking, but it feels way worse. -There is a lot of miscellaneous jank, hastily patched-together stuff, and visually ugly/incomplete areas from the game being rushed out in the end. There's some other stuff that people used to bring up, but which has largely died off as later games did similar things: -The "multiple enemies at once aren't how the games are meant to be played" thing has tapered off between DS3, Sekiro, and ER doing a lot of that, too. -"DS2 isn't original enough, why does it keep calling back to DS1 all the time?" Which died off after DS3 was, well, DS3. -"Everything is dudes in armor" always felt a bit unfair, as 2 has other boss types, but really what it meant is that the non-humanoid fights are just unmemorable. Really, I don't know if this issue was ever properly "solved" outside of Bloodborne. Feels like a lot of the community has just resigned itself to "monster fights" always being either kind of lame or a clusterfuck. John Murdoch posted:It tracks a bit more if you're familiar with the cut content that shows DS3 was going to have explicit stealth mechanics (which also explains why so much of the game is, in fact, designed like a stealth game). Though I guess it can be argued that branched off into Sekiro. Either way we ended up with it being a part of Elden Ring. Weapon Arts are also the kind of thing I'm talking about because that system gets massively expanded in ER and while previous games had similar ideas, they weren't codified in the way DS3 did it. DS3's original plan was also to have big sprawling levels where you'd get to select where to plant bonfires. You can see that in how a lot of the earlier zones are more open and have a lot of optional nooks to explore. It does feel somewhat like a prototype of the wider open world with all the discoverable Sites of Grace in Elden Ring. Scrree posted:irrc in the warp menu the icon for Earthen Peak actually has a volcano behind the windmill, which makes it even weirder/funnier that it's not there in any version of the actual game. Earthen Peak was probably supposed to have you take those crane-cages that dangle in the sky into a volcanic caldera. There's a bit in that first cinematic trailer that shows the character walking up to the gated entrance of Iron Keep (25 seconds in): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6uyuIQYlfY Presumably it was cast aside because they couldn't finish it or there was some other issue. So Sky Volcano instead. And fun game to play: And if you've never seen that cinematic trailer before, count how many times it actually shows something in the final game. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 00:13 on May 19, 2023 |
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May 19, 2023 00:06
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Still blown away that they managed to dig up in-game assets for the big round sewer gate area.
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May 19, 2023 00:18
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Nuns with Guns posted:And fun game to play: And if you've never seen that cinematic trailer before, count how many times it actually shows something in the final game. Almost everything in that trailer shows up in game depending on how interpretive you want to get. The walk into Iron Keep and the big door don’t but things like the Manikins probably being some form of the intended invasions from SotFS, hunting you through the game but eventually becoming just an Earthen Peak enemy. Pretty much all of the Aerie shots are in the game, you have the medium dragon in the halfway arena there at the end. Climbing up the cave to look down on the dragon skeleton is an admittedly artistic interpretation of the dragon soul behind Freja. Shrouded Wood, etc. Though honestly hype as that trailer got me when they first showed it, the two (three?) trailers for 2 with just utterly baffling musical choices are so much better. Orv fucked around with this message at 00:55 on May 19, 2023 |
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May 19, 2023 00:51
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Turns out there’s like nine different extremely weird pop song Dark Souls 2 trailers and that’s sort of infeasible to link so I’ll just do the one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dirTsRekbOE
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May 19, 2023 01:03
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Orv posted:Almost everything in that trailer shows up in game depending on how interpretive you want to get. My point was things that made it into the game as originally pitched, which is basically just the Dragon Aerie (and the related scene where the Emerald Herald giving you the feather) a far shot of Drangleic Castle. And even with the Dragon Aerie they clearly had to scrap that more Kalameet-like dragon boss for the weird wyvern fight instead. I'm guessing the dragon skeleton asset was repurposed for Aldia's Keep. The woods shots don't look anything like the Shaded Woods. If that was their first concept for the area, maybe they had to drop it for the fog gimmick to mask the area being unfinished? The viney forest bits might be Forest of the Fallen Giants but it's hard to say because it's a fairly basic, short shot. Orv posted:Turns out there’s like nine different extremely weird pop song Dark Souls 2 trailers and that’s sort of infeasible to link so I’ll just do the one. Also lol yeah I have no idea who thought those were a good idea.
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May 19, 2023 14:23
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Nuns with Guns posted:There were a mix of factors involved, I think. I think another big thing is, at release, DS2 made a lot of changes designed specifically to counter common DS1 strategies. There's no early 100% block shields, trolls and turtles punish backstabs, parry timings are harder, it's harder to pull solo enemies, stamina costs are up across the board... If you play DS2 like you play DS1 your face will get smashed and I think that contributed to so much of the early 'DS2 bad' discussion.
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May 19, 2023 17:56
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My big thing is that I think a lot of the areas in ds2 are ugly and just not fun to play. like majula/heide's look nice(in similar ways) but forest of the fallen giants is so ugly and uninteresting, earthen peak and huntsman's copse are just boring and drab front to back, the gutter+black gulch are both collectively like if you drained all the personality out of blighttown, etc just about the only area in ds2 I really genuinely like is Shrine of Amana, which in a stupid twist of fate is probably the most complained about due to people with no patience and/or situational awareness
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May 19, 2023 19:55
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I like earthen peaks design, it's drab and dirty but it feels appropriate. Mostly agreed on the rest
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May 19, 2023 20:15
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The Shaded Ruins are the ugliest place to me. Because it feels like there's maybe 3 wall/floor terrain textures across the whole place and it looks awful. I don't mind how Huntsman's Copse or Earthen Peak look, but Earthen Peak being a dumping ground for a miscellaneous toybox of enemies is distracting.
Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 01:31 on May 20, 2023 |
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May 19, 2023 20:19
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| # ? May 25, 2024 00:46 |
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I love Gutter/Black Gulch. They're both fantastically oppressive the first time you explore them, have plenty of nooks and crannies, and are actually pretty straightforward to run should you want to. Plus lighting up the Gutter in full makes it look almost pretty. No Man's Wharf is pretty close too in terms of mood.
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May 19, 2023 20:21
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