From Software Dark Souls 3

[Mystary!]

It's not technically like Sif thou, Sif always cripples at a certain health treshhold, whereas with the demon you need to damage its legs specifically. It's more akin to cutting of the tails of various bosses in DS1.

 

[Surf Solar]

Damn, the pissfilter over everything looks even worse on screenshots

 

[Cowboy Moment]

It does, very well even. I'd say on average its exploration is more dangerous than that of Dark Souls, but the bosses are easier. That's also why the end-game sucks so much - there's nowhere left to explore.

Really? That's surprising. Is it an open-ended sort of exploration like in DS1 where you get many possible paths, including being able to access endgame areas early, or is it like DS3, with relatively big areas you nonetheless have to progress through in a mostly linear fashion?

Don't be fooled, I bought this game off of pepe's recommendation and I was horribly disappointed. It's utter shit. All levels look the same, all enemies look the same, the combat is clunky and stupid, there's no variation to anything, no reason to explore because all items are meaningless anyway and as far as I remember it's 100% linear, the art is completely uninspired and it just plain looks ugly and plays ugly. It's a terrible game, avoid it at all costs.

You'd think pepe would know what's up, but you'd be wrong. But based on the other two guys who recommended the game on this very page you can tell it's probably not worth bothering.

The game isn't necessarily linear, but it does chokepoint in a few spots. You can access Lothric Castle early but you're gated at the Archives. There's a branch at The Road of Sacrifices which goes to Cathedral of the Deep and Farron's Keep, and from the Abyss Watchers the Smouldering Lake is completely optional. Irithyl Valley branches off towards the Profaned Capital and Anor Londo, but those are both dead ends just like Cathedral of the Deep.

I think the real problem is that the areas themselves just aren't as big as they were in DS1, so it doesn't feel like there's as much exploration going on. There's also no intersectionality between the levels like you had a few times in Dark Souls 1. Paths branch off and you can do most of them in any order, but all the branches end up at dead ends, so there's one main corridor of progression along which the action flows.

The real problem isn't so much the actual linearity of the world, which is by far the most linear of all the Souls games, but rather that it feels designed to be experienced linearly. The only real sequence break is gated behind a boss with high defenses who will also oneshot you (you can tank a hit from Manus in DS1 at SL1, but Dancer oneshot my 15 Vigor, Embered character with multiple moves), and the area design simply doesn't require any approach other than exploring thoroughly and never coming back - there are no high-level optional enemies guarding stuff, no locked doors, no paths with specific item requirements (the lava rooms in the Demon Ruins are the only ones that come to mind, and you get those by stacking normal fire resist rather than needing a special item), in essence, no reason to ever come back to an area after going through it once.

Not to bring up DS1, which was full of this kind of stuff, but even in DS2, Forest of Fallen Giants had one locked door the key to which was found in Iron Keep, a locked gate which led to endgame stuff, and more optional endgame stuff with the Giant Memories. You could go to the Shaded Woods crossroads and find two closed paths leading to various endgame stages, Lost Bastille had a variety of locked doors and optional paths, and the game in general tried to make this approach somewhat systemic with the introduction of Fragrant Branches and Pharros Lockstones. And even though you couldn't go to endgame areas immediately, you could still find stuff above your intended character power relatively easily - like trying to do the Iron Keep route first or fighting Gargoyles immediately after Ruin Sentinels.

None of this exists in DS3. Every area is basically self-contained and if you can get there, you can also kill everything within. It's rather disappointing, because it really wasn't hard to, say, put an Outrider Knight guarding some stuff in the High Wall of Lothric somewhere (instead of guarding the gate to Road of Sacrifice, which makes for a rather jarring difficulty spike). They simply chose not to for whatever reason - the idea of being able to get in over your head, like the idea of being able to get lost, was just streamlined out of the game, it seems to me.

 

[Talby]

That's exactly the problem. When you entered a new zone in Dark Souls, you had no idea if it would be appropriate for your level or if you were walking into a deathtrap. The only way to find out was to start exploring and learn about the area. In Dark Souls 3, you will always be at the correct power level for any area you discover. The same streamlined, linear progression was also present in Bloodborne.

 

[Leechmonger]

The ability to warp between bonfires from the beginning is antithetical to DS1's design, so it's no surprise that neither DS2 nor DS3 were able to match it. They no longer need to design levels that connect in interesting ways (and therefore can be navigated by the player in interesting ways) and hold the player's attention through multiple visits.

If you want to know if a hypothetical future Souls game has a chance of recapturing what made DS1 great: look at its bonfire warp system. The rest of the game's design will reflect it.

 

[cvv]

Fast travel is not necessarily a bad thing, quite a few veterans of the community prefer it. Depends on the execution tho. The way DS3 does it - a bonfire every few steps and you can teleport to every one of them - is clearly retarded. The other day I remembered one particularly stupid bonfire chain: Dragon Barracks - Lothric Castle - the Dancer - Vordt - Foot of the High Wall - Undead Settlement. Six bonfires literally a few seconds of sprint in between.

What I would've prefered in DS1 though would be the ability to warp from the beginning but only between some bonfires - basically having the Lordvessel from the get go. Jogging through the longest possible route - from the Dragon Altar in Ash Lake to the Princess in Anor Londo - is not my idea of fun.

 

[Damned Registrations]

You know, there is a middle ground between trying to fight the dancer before vordt and fighting it dead last after you've exhausted all other options. I think it was my 5th or 6th boss kill, and it was difficult, but certainly not impossible by that point.

Also, fuck DS2 and it's stretch of basically everything after the 4 great souls. It's a completely linear slog of what, 8 bosses or some shit that are each gated by the previous boss? Christ. And it really is designed to be the last thing you do so there is nowhere else to go at that point. At least the DLC fixes that. DS3 never had anything close to that, you have multiple boss fights available until the last 3 I think, even in the worst case scenario.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

This problem was already solved 20 years ago by the game DS1 shares the most when it comes to exploration - Symphony of the Night. You simply put 4-5 teleporters at key locations around your world, and let the player travel between the ones they've discovered. This actually makes exploration better, as teleporters act as important milestones, and you can organize NPCs and vendors around them without congregating all of them in one location, which always feels a bit artificial.

So, for example, in DS1, instead of getting the Lordvessel after beating O&S, you'd unlock the Anor Londo teleporter. Ditto for Quelaag, and maybe somewhere in Darkroot Garden? DS1 doesn't need that many now that I think about it, the only problematic journeys from Firelink are to Anor Londo/Duke's Archive and to Demon Ruins/Izalith.

 

[Raghar]

What I would've prefered in DS1 though would be the ability to warp from the beginning but only between some bonfires - basically having the Lordvessel from the get go.

That would hurt suspension of disbelief.

 

[Damned Registrations]

SotN has pretty much the ideal setup for encouraging exploration. It does three things:

1. Access to areas is limited by character abilities being used in natural ways. Wolf form might get you to the same spot as the bat form does, if it's across a big chasm, for example. (It also has stupid things like the mist grates but the point is not all the barred areas are like that.)
2. Many areas can be accessed from multiple directions; this includes the fact that most of the special abilities aren't gated behind eachother- you could get the bat or wolf form first in the above example, you're not guaranteed to get one before the other like a lot of the shitty metroidvania wannabe games.
   
3. Exploration yields extremely important things, like equipment you'll never find a strictly better version of (like say, the elemental absorbtion circlets) or special character abilities that unlock new parts of the castle.

Thanks to those three factors, exploring that castle is fucking awesome. Almost no other game has all three of those factors (Metroid games are the only ones that come to mind, in fact.)

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Yeah, the only problem SotN has is that it gets too easy if you explore thoroughly, otherwise it's pretty much the ideal to aspire to. Worth nothing also is that character abilities let you traverse the castle more easily, so as travel distances get longer, your ability to cross them also improves. Souls games don't have anything similar, which is part of the reason they need bonfire warping.

 

[Zep Zepo]

I accidentally put Raw on a (wrong) weapon...anyway to remove it?

Zep--

 

[Damned Registrations]

I accidentally put Raw on a (wrong) weapon...anyway to remove it?

Zep--

Yeah, there's a stone for removing infusions. Although, in my experience, having no infusion at all is very rarely the best option. You probably want one of the scaling infusions instead, I'd just overwrite it with whichever is best.

 

[Bradylama]

I accidentally put Raw on a (wrong) weapon...anyway to remove it?

Zep--

You could try farming Shriving Stones from the bird hybrids along Road of Sacrifices, if you don't have any. You've lost that Raw gem though. Gotta find another one.

 

[felipepepe]

Also, SOTN flips upside down and has shittons of content again once you beat it. That's a true classic.

 

[Perkel]

Also, SOTN flips upside down and has shittons of content again once you beat it. That's a true classic.

I remember when i first played it i couldn't find 2% of map to get 100%. After like 20 hours i discovered upside down and i was like WTF !!. Then whole other castle of new bosses and so on :D

 

[Ivan]

that's if you do what's required to even unlock the flipped castle

 

[praetor]

so.. remember how a few pages back Juutas tested poise and found it affected roll recovery frames? well, it seems he was wrong and poise actually does fuck all. lol

 

[Grimlorn]

Does the new patch fix poise or not? I'm guessing it doesn't. I'm guessing they left out poise to make the game harder.

 

[cvv]

Does the new patch fix poise or not?

Read the patch notes, it's not there. But we'll see in six hours what exactly is it gonna change.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

The game has been out for over a month in Japan bros, they're not going to fix shit.

Seriously though, the roll stagger immunity being caused by equip load, of all things, is the silliest thing I've seen in a Souls game ever. It's not even bad, just... why? How can such an otherwise polished game have such a messy combat system, after four games worth of tweaking and experimentation. And it's not like DS2 where they tried to actually fix various problems and introduced new ones in the process, in DS3 it's as if someone designed the thing by throwing darts at a board.

Edit: Also, this actually means that your roll is the best close to 70% weight.

 

[Mystary!]

Goddamnit, ~300.000 souls out of reach...

Spoiler

 

[Surf Solar]

Spent all day as aldrich faithful in anal londo. Was pretty fun. I get summoned so fast that I dont even have time to remove the covenant item so many people just turtling behind their shield and then acting surprised when you guardbreak them.. is this just because the game is new and many noobs playing it? And I am not even doing any 2 vs 1 as gangbangs are boring.

Also, any tips on the two croco/wolf hybrids down where the covenant is? They rape me everytime I try to fight them as I cant see shit..

Gonna try to get maxrank as blue sentinel next, this one will take a while

 

[CptMace]

Catacombs and New Londor, to name them both

ftfy. Blighttown is, by no means, a late-game area. You can clear Blighttown with the starting gear of most classes.

And it's actually a bad example, because the catacombs have a magical barrier while new londo requires artorias' covenant. So you can go there, technically, but you won't be able to reach the end because magic and shit. So it's actually not that open.

Demon's Souls was pretty open-ended. The only place you couldn't go was past the tower knight, but it only required one major demon's soul to unlock 1-3. You can actually skip 3 whole worlds out of the 4 optional ones. Still the most open-ended of the series by far.

 

[Mystary!]

Also, any tips on the two croco/wolf hybrids down where the covenant is? They rape me everytime I try to fight them as I cant see shit..

try rolling