From Software Dark Souls 3

[Decado]

I've played a lot of Dark Souls, and I just spent the weekend playing DS1 Remastered. I'm not sure if 3 is my favorite, but it is better than 2. The proper ranking of FROM games, by the way, is DS1, BB, DS3, DS2.

You've never played Demon's Souls.

Nope. I skipped the PS3. I didn't own a console for 10+ years. I suspect I will play it eventually (I've heard a rumor that Atlus is going to do a PS4 remaster, but we'll see . . .)

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

875 hours in DA:O?

?????????????????

I mean she is kinda hot

The red head was hotter.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

• Lore-wise, DS3 is the weakest. DS2 had some interesting stuff about the giants, etc, but moving the game to Drangleic . . . I dunno. It was not a compelling setting. BB2 was a little schizcophrenic, was it about nightmares and dreams and hunting, or about cosmic horrors? They could have just picked one (I prefer cosmic horrors), and made a whole game out of that.
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Its implied in that Drangleic is the region from DS1, just way, way into the future.
Not really sure I agree with that, mind you. It feels like a lazy way of connecting 2 to 1. "Oh no, its totally in the same geographical region. Its just another time, you see? Because time is convoluted. Look, there's the Altar of Sunlight! Totally the same area"

 

[praetor]

fuck it, i have time so let's do this

• Itemization in 3 is "better" in the sense that most of the best weapons you can get by achieving in-game goals, e.g. beating a boss or finding a certain area. DS2 gave them out too easy. And worse, DS1 had too many weapons that you had to farm in order to get. I don't mind a little farming, but it seemed excessive in DS1.

meh. the way by which you can obtain items is hardly grounds for "better itemization" unless one is really extreme in the farming department, and none of them are. they all feature farming for gear, some more than others, but DS2 has the best itemization as it has not only the most variety, but also the most amount of actually useful/viable items (and not just weapons/shields, but also consumables and armour)

• DS2 offered more builds, but some of them were ridiculous in power-level. For example, agility was a completely fucking broken stat and made you almost invincible for via roll frames. Then you've got dumb shit like dual wielding great clubs.

literally every Souls game has insanely OP builds (and they mostly vary with patches). DS2 is by far the most balanced of the bunch with all the patches it received during it's lifetime. and while i'm no fan of dual wielding gigantic anime weapons, more variety is always better than less, i guess?

agility is good idea executed badly, but hardly "broken". you start out with less iframes than DS1, and to get to DS1 level of fastroll iframes you need a decent investment (~25 points, iirc?), while to get to DS1 ninjaflip levels of iframes you'd need a very substantial investment (~50 with no att), but you don't get anywhere near the recovery frames or distance covered, so the ninjaflip is significantly superior, as is the comparable standard roll (again, same iframes, but faster animation and less recovery in DS1, and less stamina consumption). and compared to DS3, you also have to take into consideration roll speed/distance which is linearly correlated to eq burden (instead of the lame slots like DS1 and DS3), and that rolling consumes a much more significant amount of stamina in DS2, stamina regens slower so you can't spam as if you were an advanced Cirque du Soleil member, which is fucking atrocious in DS3 with superfast rolling, plenty of iframes (13 by default on medium, the highest in any Souls game. and 16 for the price of one ring slot. disgusting. for 16 iframes in DS2 you'd have to nearly max out adaptability), and rolling consumes no stamina

you'd have to be pretty fucking retarded (like, "i don't know how integers work and what they mean"-level retarded) to claim DS2 is more roll-spammy than DS3 when the objective numbers (and subjective opinions of everyone except you and morons like Damned Registrations) speak the contrary

• DS2 fashion sucked.

as the other poster said, you're 100% wrong and even when you take into consideration it's 100% subjective, DS3 has the massive fashion problem that helmets don't really match with 95% of armours because they're all weirdly high placed on the char head for some stupid fucking reason (and like half the sets in DS3 are recycled). plus, DS3 doesn't have a fucking predator samurai armour (yeah yeah i know only edgy tryhards wear it, but considering what it is, it's really well done aesthetically so bite me )

• DS3 was faster and you can definitely see BB's DNA in the game.
• Because of the above, certain playstyles were rewarded more than others. DS3 in many ways feels like "Berserk: The Role Playing Game."
• Because of this, some playstyles just didn't feel as fleshed out. For example, you could legitimately roll and play a tank in DS1 from start to finish. In DS3, tanking is not viable until you find your first Greatshield (arguably, Curseward in the Cathedral), but even then, Cathedral Knights can wreck your stam in one or two hits. For most of the game, rolling will always be a better option than tanking for 90% of the time, which I don't like.

yes, and that's exactly why DS3 has by far the worst combat mechanics in the series. everything is fast, everything staggers, poise is next to useless, so the only truly viable strategy is spam roll until the enemy is done with their n-th 16-hit combo animation, and then spam R1 until you're out of stamina or the enemy is dead. magic is garbage, miracles as well, hexes aren't a separate thing anymore, and pyros require a hefty investment so hybrid builds are nonexistent

• The weapon customization in DS3 is fucking awesome. Infusions are a great idea, and they were implemented well.

eh, i don't know. i liked the DS2 system better, where you couldn't change the physical scaling stat of a weapon, so certain builds could never be effective with certain weapons. this essentially removes the necessity for any physical stat, and they might have as well just put "physical damage" instead of str and dex. the rest is similar enough that whatever.

• DS1 was harder at first, but is easier upon repeated play throughs. I think the AI in DS3 is better -- I don't die on DS1 bosses anymore, ever. But DS3 bosses can still fuck me up. They're just smarter.

lolno. no AI in any Souls game is any smarter than any other. they just have a set of moves they execute at certain states/player distance. it's just that DS3 bosses have endless fucking combos that take them all over the place and have big hitboxes, and one mistake can easily get you killed because everything staggers you on hit 1. and they often have obnoxious amounts of health. they're not better, it's just that the combat is worse

• DS2 substituted good boss design for shitty gimmicks (fuck you, Ruin Sentinels)

huh? you're probably the first person in the world to say this, as the usual (invalid) criticism of DS2 bosses is "they're all giant knights with weapons" (i.e. the opposite of gimmicky). if anything, DS3 has more gimmicky bosses (the wyvern, the tree, the priestly bunch etc), not to mention that every single fucking boss has the gimmick of 2 phases (except for Friede which has 3 :/ )... but DeS is still, by faaar, the reigning champion of gimmicky bosses.

that said, when it comes to bosses, when DS3 nails it, it's just fucking spectacular both visually and mechanically. Nameless King and Champion Gundyr will always be one of my favourite bosses ever (if not THE favourite)

• DS1, DS3, and BB all offer you really good, understated weapons in the very beginning of the game. I think this is Miyazaki being clever, but consider that (for example), the Saw Cleaver in BB is the first weapon you get and it is FUCKING AWESOME from the very beginning, and is a powerhouse by the end of the game. In DS3, a Raw ASS will last a magic-focused character almost the entire game, and you get it within 30 minutes of starting. In DS1, the long sword and the claymore are simply phenomenal weapons, and you can get them both almost right away (if you don't pick a warrior and start with the former, you can buy it pretty quickly from Andre).

and so does DS2. fuck, you can craft boss weapons by the time you're halfway through the Bastille, which is what... 10% of the game?

• Lightning in DS2 was fucking OP'd but I loved it. DS2 probably allowed me to play a lightning-cleric/Paladin better than DS1 or D3.

as already stated, Lightning isn't OP by any reasonable definition of that word in DS2 since patch 1.05 back in fucking june or july of 2014. update your game

• Conversely, Clerics in DS3 suck and are are almost unplayable for the first quarter of the game, if you want to use miracles. The first offensive miracle you get is Lightning Spear and it fucking blows. Lightning builds do not become viable until mid-game.

it's not just miracles, they took a dump on all magics. they're all utter garbage until late game, and even then they're inferior to melee by a looong shot, and require a very specific build and only a very limited amount of spells are viable, so every spellcaster is exactly the same.

• Sound design in DS1 is still the best. BB is a close second.

surprised you didn't mention the garbage-tier sound in DS2. it's like half the sounds were recorded with a potato. go break some vases and listen, it will make your ears bleed

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

i'm really tempted to start playing around w/ cheat engine

 

[Damned Registrations]

You forgot to mention how DS2 doesn't have any fanservice, because Ornstein and dragons and the sunlight altar and dedicating a major fucking character to the laser sword was all just brilliant storytelling.

Also, you retards never learned to appreciate how poise worked in DS3. I murdered the shit out of Friede precisely by being a big tanky fucker and trading hits with her, and plenty of the other bosses. DS3 just requires you to actually time your attacks properly instead of the retarded DS1 shit where you can just stand there and then walk around and backstab someone for daring to land a perfectly good hit on you.

 

[80Maxwell08]

I will say about DS2 one of the main ways lightning could still has a major advantage is the idea of the dark being a big theme in DS2 is that with all the dark alligned bosses, their weakness being lightning helps quite a bit. I remember even after lightning got patched in SOTFS, I switched my melee character to a faith build to use the few great lightning spears and lightning spears I had to cheese darklurker and it worked, which gives you a chime that has ridiculous faith scaling so it could just keep snowballing there. I've only just got around to replaying DS2 after a couple of years so it could have changed again I guess but I doubt it that much.

 

[Jezal_k23]

I don't think DS2 has NO fanservice, but look at how much DS3 did in comparison...

Also I think my single biggest disappointment with DS3 is the Yhorm boss fight. What a shitty fight that was.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Such as? I honestly can't think of many examples that aren't simply staples in the series to begin with. Onion bro, I guess? Everything I remember about the game is pretty unique to it. Mind you, I never played BB, which all the DS2 fanboys seemed to have played and hated. I also don't really care if DS3 was similar to other games. Copying good things is better than discarding them for the sake of being new. I also don't really care if patches improved the game after launch- the game had one fucking shot to impress me on my first playthrough while I was exploring, and it failed miserably. I think the only times I got excited in DS2 were the first times I got the pharos keys and branches of yore. Followed by immediate disappointment when they did jack shit. It had a couple of interesting bosses too, like the chariot and the spider, but a shitton of forgettable ones.

 

[Decado]

Such as? I honestly can't think of many examples that aren't simply staples in the series to begin with. Onion bro, I guess? Everything I remember about the game is pretty unique to it. Mind you, I never played BB, which all the DS2 fanboys seemed to have played and hated. I also don't really care if DS3 was similar to other games. Copying good things is better than discarding them for the sake of being new. I also don't really care if patches improved the game after launch- the game had one fucking shot to impress me on my first playthrough while I was exploring, and it failed miserably. I think the only times I got excited in DS2 were the first times I got the pharos keys and branches of yore. Followed by immediate disappointment when they did jack shit. It had a couple of interesting bosses too, like the chariot and the spider, but a shitton of forgettable ones.

Duke's Dear Frejya (the spider fuck) was bugged, it was possible to kill both "heads" and still leave the main creature alive with HP. Fucking dumb.

 

[Jezal_k23]

I also didn't see anything so special with the spider. Fume Knight (the best DS2 boss), Sir Alonne, Lost Sinner (especially in NG+ and forwards), Watcher/Defender, Ruin Sentinels, etc. were more interesting IMO.

Funnily enough a common DS2 complaint is that it had too many knight bosses, and yet out of all bosses the best ones by far were generally humanoid. The monster ones like Demon of Song (MEH) were mostly meh.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Demon of Song and the slug in Earthen Peak were garbage, but hardly because they weren't humanoid. They just don't have interesting patterns or mechanics. Summoning shit during the fight and having specific weak points are interesting mechanics. Sinner's only mechanic was being a dick to ranged characters by cancelling their lockon unless you turned the lights on. Hardly an interesting fight. All these knight bosses were boring as fuck because all you could do was dodge strafe until they did one of their two attacks you could actually counter safely. Woo. Watcher/Defender at least did the revival thing, but Lothric did that way better and was a much more interesting fight. Ruin sentinels had what, a buggy shield toss? The way you fight these guys is all the same. You can't trade hits because they never stagger and will flatten you with one swing. You can't block for the same reason. You can't parry.

What part of this fight is interesting or unique? It's a bunch of extremely generic attacks you see in a dozen other bosses. I especially loathe the part where he runs out of estus but it doesn't matter because DS2 gives you essentially infinite fucking healing.


The Farron Knights were interesting because you had multiple ways of fighting them, including having them kill eachother in the first phase, which no other boss in the series does AFAIK.



This is a way better fight, involving actual exchanges and back and forth. Dodging requires actually fucking dodging because of the lingering fire, instead of just having correctly timed iframes. When the fuck would you ever go ham on a boss in DS2 instead of just rolling away and healing up like usual?

 

[Jezal_k23]

Abyss Watchers are a good boss fight as well. One of the best in DS3. Not everything that I say DS2 did right has to be compared to DS3 to determine that it's better for some reason (????).

Sir Alonne is an intense fight that keeps you on your toes. Without you having played it, I think you miss out on the experience, so nothing I argue will be relevant.

BTW I think DS3 has one of the ingredients that would constitute a perfect Souls game - the big levels, generally well designed too. If we could combine the interesting interconnected world from DS1 with the combat system / arsenal / environmental diversity from DS2 (also certainly the same kind of level design they employed in the DLCs) and big levels from DS3, we'd have an absolutely amazing Souls game. I think all 3 games did several things right that if we were to combine them into a single game, the results would be fantastic, in theory.

 

[Bester]

That DS2 is somehow worse than DS1 is just a meme started by Vaati and perpetrated by a loud minority of morons.

DS2 is the best game in the series, but I don't have time to sperge about it on multiple A4 pages.

 

[Arnust]

That DS2 is somehow worse than DS1 is just a meme started by Vaati and perpetrated by a loud minority of morons.

Aren't you talking about Matthewmatosis? Vaati was pretty kindly on it, shilling or not.

 

[Wunderbar]

Btw, Matthewmatosis disliked DS3 too.
And Bloodborne, apparentely.

 

[Arnust]

Btw, Matthewmatosis disliked DS3 too.
And Bloodborne, apparentely.

Matthewphimosis is one of those fuckers who waited until the series was done to go "Nyehhh, well DeS was the best one all along, psyche"

I wouldn't know about 3 or BB because hearing any more than a minute of his squaky leprechaun voice makes me want to try and see if there's a pot of gold inside my wrists. I did see the absolute trashfire of the DS2 video that pretty much turned the general consensus.

 

[Wunderbar]

BTW I think DS3 has one of the ingredients that would constitute a perfect Souls game - the big levels, generally well designed too. If we could combine the interesting interconnected world from DS1 with the combat system / arsenal / environmental diversity from DS2 (also certainly the same kind of level design they employed in the DLCs) and big levels from DS3, we'd have an absolutely amazing Souls game. I think all 3 games did several things right that if we were to combine them into a single game, the results would be fantastic, in theory.

all of those best parts were in DLCs for DaS2.

Levels are interconnected (within DLC);
Combat system and arsenal are from DaS2;
Levels are diverse (poisonous ziggurat, iron tower in lava, snowy castle), their design is awesome, and they are huge;
Great bossfights that combine challenging patterns, good lore and interesting gimmicks (Sinh with his corrosive skin, Raime and Nadalia's idols, invisible cat, Loyce knights vs Burnt Ivory king).

Go team Tanimura!

 

[Wunderbar]

I wouldn't know because hearing any more than a minute of his squaky leprechaun voice makes me want to try and see if there's a pot of gold inside my wrists. I did see the absolute trashfire of the DS2 video that pretty much turned the general consensus.

he did an awesome video where he shits all over Bioshock Infinite, so I forgive him.

 

[Hyperion]

Sinner's only mechanic was being a dick to ranged characters by cancelling their lockon unless you turned the lights on

Or cancelling lockon during her jump attack, which had a significant delay. Jumping behind you during the fight. Two Red Phantom Pyromancers that jump in to completely throw off the pacing of the fight. And you had to be cognizant of her backswing, which did damage - dodging actually requires fucking dodging because of lingering fire damage, instead of just having correctly timed i-frames.

Watcher/Defender at least did the revival thing, but Lothric did that way better and was a much more interesting fight.

Watcher is also one of the only bosses in the series that can, and will, parry you, likely resulting in a OHKO. Defender is meant to be slow, and beefy. The arena is also small with death traps on the back half. Positioning in a 2 boss fight is actually important for once. I wouldn't know about the Twin princes fight, I played DS3 4 times and got bored of it right after Ocelot every single time, and never made it to them. All I know is one Prince looks like Edgar Winter, and is a fairyboy. They seem to be well received, though.

What part of this fight is interesting or unique?

It's a honorabu duel, nigga. That's how it's SUPPOSED to be. If you beat Sir Alonne without getting hit he commits Sudoku. That makes the fight awesome by itself because it makes you want to get better, not just get by.

This is a way better fight, involving actual exchanges and back and forth.

Any boss that can be killed by backstab fishing sucks. Period. I know because I did it. And used 0 Estus. Abyss Watchers fight is a shitty group of Artorias cosplayers put in to get Miyazaki nerds he-pussies wet.

Demon of Song (MEH)

I sunbro'd the FUCK out of DS2, and no boss fight, save Smelter Demon, had as many Hosts getting their shit pushed in as this boss. It was absolutely unreal how many niggas got flattened by this dumbass frog, and cost me precious loadtimes / bro medals.

Ruin sentinels had what, a buggy shield toss?

The zone-in of that fight is intended to whack you with his hammer / halberd / golf club and knock you onto the floor instagibbing you, or making it 3 v 1, not 2 v 1. 2 v 1 is annoying. 3 v 1 is a serious buttcheek clenching moment. Also, before the shield toss Ruin Sentinels block every attack to their right (your left), something else most bosses can't / don't do. Oh, and fuck that retard spin they do. Bullshit fucking attack that rolling doesn't do shit against.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

All of you who need to shit in a game to praise another are a bunch of tards, nuff said.

PD: Matthewmatosis is who began all the DS2 hate war wagon. He's the Gwyndolin of this story.

 

[Quatlo]

Did someone finally figure out a convienient way to "save" your progress just before the boss fight? I sometimes get the craving to fight particular boss but then I remember I probably have to complete whole fucking game again and I drop the idea out of pure lazyness.
I guess I'll have to make some nice savegame compilation for myself to play around.

 

[Silva]

Was the Ringed City an inspiration for New Londo/Londor or something? I mean, perhaps DS1 Four Kings consciously adopted the Ringed City symbolism they heard from old legends to their city, when they sided with the Abyss? Or maybe Kaate brought all that with him? There are too many similarities to be a coincidence:

- Darkwraight armor is almost identical to Ringed Knight's
- Sword of Avowal = DS1 Key to the Seal = sigil atop Ringed City spires
- Both human based
- Both defiant of the gods
- Both have links to Kaate
- Both practice lifedrain (Locusts, Darkwraights)

 

[Silva]

What does the hopw roewur face means Arnust ? Is that theory so obvious and I'm a retardo for only seeing it now, is that it?

 

[Decado]

Ringed City was a pretty great DLC.