From Software The Dark Souls II Megathread™

Bros, can you please provide me with some decent DaS 2 criticism videos? I'm just curious.

 

Even Oscar has more depth than some of these cats. The most I think you get is Pate and Crichton; possibly the cleric chick. I guess she did something but her guilt was made obvious the second you talk to her and she freudian slips about taking advantage of people.

Oh, right, the mansion -- was that a thing? I just started NG + but I didn't check the mansion before I transitioned. I notice a lot of blood stains there; is that because of the skeleton or does something else happen?

 

this was linked a few pages back from reddit with the comments from A German Spy about how he too was disappointed. It's long, but p good; and dudebro is not obnoxious to listen to nor does he stall or spend time on stupid nitpicking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UScsme8didI&feature=youtu.be

EDIT: embedded-

 

Thx bro!

 

A pretty decent analysis, though some of the "issues" can also be applied to the first DaS.

BTW are there any decent retrospectives of Souls series and of From Software history?

 

Super Bunnyhop has a very nicely edited video on Dark Souls you should check it out
And Static don't spoil yourself try the game first enjoy it and make your own opinion tovarisch
For 20% of good points matthewmatosis makes is trashed by the rest of the 80% nitpicking that could be applied to any of the Souls games and pointles biased nerdangst; I mean his whinning about the opening cinematic, red haze, hitboxes (without even showing any knowledge about the effects of adaptability and agility) is simply pathetic.
And all those youtubers who had early access to the game are entitled to all their opinions...but coming out before release when they had at least 2 weeks of early access to the game and jus say how awesome and wonderful it was and then change their minds 6 weeks in is pretty predictable; these are not profesional reviewers who are bought and paid or who have the balls to stand by their statements like men.
Anyway I don't think the same pandering with youtubers will work 3 or 4 years down the line with the next game so they made the most of it anyway
ENB and AGS are ok but that spineless manwhore Vaati asking for "donations" which he knows are 90% from Souls fans...sorry buddy but once you take their money you have a responsability to either give them what they want or jump in the "it aint so good" bandwagon and cry you had a change of mind because the new car smell has faded away

 

I will, I was just curious, you know you can form your opinion not only judging by your own impression, but also considering the opinions of other people, which can reveal something hidden for you. So I'll play the game later, it's just too much souls gameplay for me at the time after beating DaS (and I still haven't touched DeS I own from PS+).

 

God, the endgame is fucking awful. I've long since passed the point where additional souls make me stronger, but even if I did want them to become a fighter/mage/priest/rogue/dragonborn or whatever the fuck, I'm now fighting enemies that give 200 souls when slain. Who can still fucking one shot me. What the fuck. You've already established I have over a million souls, and you're giving me shit like this, and bosses that don't even fork over 30k?

Considering starting over as a mage simply because they seem to keep getting goodies even lategame in the form of spells dropping/stashed in random places. And branching from sorcery to other forms of magic is way more viable than going from str to dex weapons, which offers no real improvement anyways and requires finding and upgrading whole new sets of equipment.

 

Sorcery is crap. If you want to be a caster, go faith and then hexing. And yeah, the endgame is crap.

 

Faith is indeed broken; you can get lightning bolt right at the beginning game (mace is op; you can easily kill dragon rider with it) and spend the souls on the cleric chick. Light bolt's 9 castings can easily shred any boss to pieces in the early game, and in no man's wharf you'll find emit force which is a bit worse but still very, very good. Depending on your attunement you should have at least 16 castings of damage and that's more than enough for any boss until you get the 4 old ones. Even then, I really only recall The Rotten being resistant (at which point i just slapped some charcoal resin and bashed him).

I made a sorc and so far it's a lot more pew pew and less actual killing. Might make him a hexer instead since I haven't dumped too much into Int just yet.

Of the areas so far, No Man's Wharf is pretty cool. Good looping shortcut, decent ambushes that make sense and don't rely on "lol gotcha", use of the torch to stun the monsters (and good use of a Pharro's Lockstone).

I ran some bros through it earlier today and it was p fun just jumping around, going through buildings in reverse order, and just having some fun. Too bad so many of the other areas are just corridors.

 

No Mans Wharf has a very solid design, it's what I expect from Dark Souls game, reminded me of castles and sewers from DS1 with it's pace and difficulty. Now if only it had been connected to the world in not a such mind boggling way... but we already past that I guess.

 

Can't remember Lockstone being used in this area, pray tell where do you use it and what does it do with as little spoilers as possible... (I've finished the area already)

 

I lol'ed at replies. "B-but developers love us, they would never fuck up something like that!". And yeah theory makes sense.

It's either after first or second stairs to the right, where varangian is throwing oil at you. Using lockstone there makes huge lantern on the ceiling glow, which in turn makes all the gorilla-like monsters avoid light areas and hide in dark, clearing your way.

 

I think the best way to become a hexer is to pop a soul vessel to get you to 16/14 stats or something like that. It's somewhat pointless to spend 10 levels on raising a stat you're not using, when you could instead spend it elsewhere and then move the points. Not like soul vessels are rare.

 

Goddamnit I can't kill Royal Rat Autority :X

 

I found the best way to do it was to bait his right paw attack, go under his head while he's doing it, and hit the leg. He has a lot of attacks that are hard to dodge and drain a lot of stamina to block, but that one is very reliable.

 

That's the big rat, right? Stay behind him. His lunge attack is hard to time on the doge, but if you stay behind his legs you're safe. I stayed behind his left leg and just strafed with him, hitting whenever he did a swipe. He didn't have any hits, other than the far reaching swipe that could touch me (and that's because I was attacking instead of moving behind him.)

For the little rats I used an AOE; heavenly thunder and then just picked off the remaining one to avoid toxic.

And what Shadenaut said. The stairs up, to the right before the oil-throwing guy there's a bandit + dog with 2 archers on the building. To the right is a face-spot on the ground. Lights the lantern giving you farther lock-on range, too (for spells and what-not) so you can snipe the archers with magic. Also, if you fall off the ledge there, there is the item above the hut the first monster was in (when you first cross the bridge/plank over).

 

Even if you're not a caster, you can use a bow (dragonrider's i think has B scaling in strength) to snipe all the little ones from entrance except one.

 

There's also Gaydar in there.

Btw what should I forge with Vendrick's and the Throne duo's souls?The shields seem to have some good specific resistances but the scaling for the swords(Vendrick) and the buffs for the duo seem nice too.

 

Defender's Shield is the best medium shield in the game, get that one with the Throne Defender Soul. King's Sword is theoretically the highest damage weapon in the game, as long as you carry several million Souls with you.

 

Rulers Sword has an awesome R2 combo that is made even better with its huge damage that it gets from soul scaling and a dark buff.

 

So I left ratbro covenant after I got the final rank. Joined blood guys, but I've lost every match I participated in. Gimmick build is too bad, and I'm not sure I can be arsed to play more PvE to get better gear and what not. All the cool stuff needs dragon bone and twinklers anyway, and that stuff is locked away in the shitty part of the game that I really don't feel like doing again.

 

Some criticism:

Weapons no longer feel unique, they are just palette-timing-swapped. In DaS1 they had at least one special move.

Designs lack elegance, the Miyazaki interview comes to mind (http://imgur.com/zO6CcDq).

Most bosses suck ass, some are cool.

 

Finally got around to installing and playing around for a bit.

Immediate impressions, whoa, this game looks like shit.

Second impression, Whoa, i'm getting my anus packed in, dudes chasing you down is definitely noticable

 

Nah, lots of weapons have unique movesets, or at least varied ones. The twinblades for example, heide's sword (I'd kill for another weapon with that moveset without the shitty split damage) and some oddities like the archdrake hammer, which is classed as a great hammer (and breaks poise and shields like a giant club) but has the moveset of a halberd.

There are simply so many more weapons that there's more overlap now, but there's more variety too. And the fact that you can infuse elements in special weapons is awesome (albeit rather pointless in most cases, no way in hell I'm going to make a weapon split damage between 3 elements or add poison or bleeding or poison to a heavy weapon.)

As for bosses, I feel like they've done a better job this time around. Yeah, lots of them have generic sword attacks, but what else are they going to do with a sword? Still feels very different fighting pursuer dashing around compared to other ones for example, and lots of fights have interesting terrain or multiple enemies. And there are so many more bosses it feels like a lot more variety even among the duels.