From Software The Dark Souls II Megathread™

[meanwhileInPoland]

dear god i'm tired of explaining the same concepts again and again to the same fucking braindead retards. it's shitty item progression. for Hexers you get really good (and even the best shit) at the fucking start (you have the pick of 3 staves by Bastille), and miraclemen also get their fair share of chimes early on. learn to fucking read, imbecile

well maybe hexers got good staff early on because they need to invest in both faith/int, their spells tends to take 2 or 3 slot instead of one and have rather high requirements than fucking great soul arrows which you can spam like no tomorrow?

as pointed out, you can't go to Shaded woods until you find a Fragrant branch in either Sinners rise, Harvest Valley (the most likely candidate for the vast majority of players, i'm betting) or Black gulch. and can't go to HV without Copse, and can't go to Copse without Heide (and then after you unlock the Shrine of winter/Drangleic castle it's a very linear romp)

and how is DS1 after Ornstein&Smough? You have to beat four bosses in 4 different locations which are miles away from each other but thanks to Lord Vessel you just warp between them.

DS2 gets linear after Drangleic Castle but at least those locations and bosses gets better and better(aesthetic/lore/atmospher wise) instead of Bed of fucking Chaos or Asylum Demon 3.0.

Also Covennant of Abyss is late game side quest with some of thoughest fights in Souls games. Darklurker is great fight unless you cheese him with pyro but you can do it to almost any boss in Souls games.

dude, enemy not boss. count the number of areas you can explore before killing the first real boss in DaS1 (with the master key, of course). there's skellies to discourage you from entering the catacombs and ghosts in new londo, just to name a few

and there is astora sword which one shot those skellies or you can curse yourself with item you find at the beginning of the level and clean new londo before you even fight Taurus.

since when tough enemies stopped our progression in Souls games?

do you have your retard diploma proudly hanging above your bed? please teach me how to be this stupid so i can read your posts without getting an aneurysm

how about you press that "ignore" button instead of making it personal?

 

[80Maxwell08]

I guess I'm really lucky with these drops. I got a Lizard Staff my first kill and did a bunch of trading with those crows and I got a white ring and a petrified dragon bone (among other random trinkets). Also Sorcery is still rather boring. It's a handy ranged option but not that much.
EDIT: Oh by the way wearing the white ring makes you a living light source.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Oh by the way wearing the white ring makes you a living light source.

 

[Kanedias]

So the rumors that they removed the Soul Vessel from the Majula mansion are true. It's no longer there, there's just a Divine Blessing in the chest now. This leaves the Bastille one as the earliest Soul Vessel you can get, I think.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

It's common knowledge that DS1 is unfinished decline after getting the lord vessel. Up until then, the progression is tighter than a witch's cleft. Going places makes sense in DS1, you can almost always see your destination in the distance. Going somewhere you're not supposed to punishes you. I've had plenty of fun getting out of tomb of giants after resting at the first bonfire without the lordvessel. DS2 is just a big fun-time theme-park bonfire run with tough enemies in-between.

 

[Invictus]

Is that true? In which patch did they fix that? About the soul vessel I mean

 

[Kanedias]

It doesn't have to be a patch, I think they can change small stuff like that with the "calibrations". I'm not sure, but what is certain is that Soul Vessel no longer exists.

 

[Invictus]

Just checked with a nnew char and you are correct I got a titanite chunk and other people are getting other stuff. Why would they change that? Surely having that early on allowed you to plan arround your char much better; you could go with a deprived who focused on melee early on and then switch for when you found the staff or item you wanted to for hexes for example which could prove problematic on the beginning going full int faith.
If they can switch little things they should switch the "reward" you get from the first pyro girl...I mean a damn stone? How about her giving you the pyro stuff to start with or at least something realted to her class?
Oh and props to Gamespot for that mastah troll yesterday; definetly had some fanbois raging

 

[praetor]

from the start you can go to:
DaS1:
New Londo, Catacombs, Burg, Lower Burg, Parish, Valley of Drakes, Blighttown, Asylum revisited, Darkroot garden/basin, Great Hollow, Ash Lake... all that without paying any souls, finding any item or killing any boss. only the master key is required (and seriously, why would you pick anything else if it's not your 1st playthrough?)

DaS2:
Forest of Fallen Giants (and you can't open the pursuer path [although you can kill him earlier] until you beat the last giant), Heidi's Tower. you have to kill at least one boss (assuming offline.. or spend considerable time farming for souls) to open up one more path (to buy the ring or unlock Licia), and then finish at least another area to open up the 4th path.

another thing.. take the area lists for DaS1 and DaS2, and count how many areas have more than 2 connections [i.e. ones that allow more than a linear path] (ignoring that shitloads of those connections are only one-way in DaS2). it's 8 vs 6 (i ignored the battle of stoicism in DaS1 and there's a mistake stating you can go to majula from harvest valley and from the depths to undead parish). now let's dismiss the areas that are pretty much only boss arenas (cathedral of blue, throne of want, purgatory) and you're down to 3. and one of those 3 (shaded woods to shrine/castle) doesn't open up until you accumulate 1mil souls/get the 4 lord souls for one path, and the other path (shaded woods to aldia) opens up only when you finish the previous path. similarly, let's ignore the same stuff for DaS1 (the abyss, quleaag's but blighttown connects to more so whatever) and we're down to 7, of which one opens up after the 2 bells and another after getting 2 macguffins (the doll and lordvessel)

yeah, bosses in DaS2 get sooo much better after you open Drangleic... yeah. totally. the pushovers dragonriders? awesome. the bullshit dragons that aren't even 10% as fun as kalameet? fantastic. battletoad? fabulous. king "stick to the wall HP sponge with easily avoidable OHKO attacks" vendrick? amazing. garl "lemme charge up my dork magix for 10 seconds and take full damage" vinalnd jr? magnificent. queen "lemme do nothing in-between attacks for 30 seconds.. wait, i'll charge up mah laz0r for 15 minutes so you can easily avoid it and wail on me" nashandra? best fight in the series. only the mirror knight and the dynamic duo are good fights after the 4 lord souls.

"way less linear" my fucking ass. i'm totally okay with people liking DaS2 more than 1, both are great games and really close to each other in quality, just don't make up easily verifiable bullshit. and so far DaS2's netcode is infintely worse than 1 in my experience, as is the framerate. the "soft bans for 5mins" when a summoning/invasion inevitably fails is one of the most retaded decisions they've made since they exist as a company. hire some fucking help if you're so fucking bad at programming, for satan's sake!

 

[Jick Magger]

I think people are confusing "Less hand-holding" and "More optional content" with "Less linearity". Dark Souls 1 consistently gives you an idea of where you need to go (Ring the bells -> Go to Anor Londo -> Get the Lord Vessel -> Get the Lord Souls -> Fight Gwyn, as well as all the sub-objectives necessary to follow these steps), while putting strong enemies at the entrances of areas they don't want you to go to early-game (Army of Skeletons, some respawning, at the Catacombs, Spectres in the New Londo Ruins) as a soft method of encouraging players to head for the Undead Burg first. Dark Souls II is alot more hands-off with its objectives (Obtain the four lord souls -> Seek out The King -> Get through the Throne of Want), with alot of areas just being optional.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I'm just putting this here in case someone hasn't seen it.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I'm just putting this here in case someone hasn't seen it.

Incidentally, the guy doing the voice in that video is one of the voice actors we've got for Van Buren.

 

[Kanedias]

I finally found an explanation to the Earthen Peak -> Iron Keep issue, and I think it's spot on. For some reason, they must have changed the level locations during development, and the Iron Keep was originally supposed to be located below the Forest of Fallen Giants.

First, let's notice the presence of Ironclads (the turtle knights) in the Forest of Fallen Giants. The only other place that has them is the Iron Keep. The door to the Cardinal Tower bonfire (the second bonfire of the Forest) has a really similar design to the doors in the Iron Keep, but let's see the main piece of evidence: The Salamander Pit and the Iron Key.

The Iron Key is found in the first part of the Iron Keep, and it opens the door to the Salamander Pit in the Forest. This is really weird, as the description of the key says:

Key to the iron door in the Iron Keep.
The Old Iron King's Castle sunk into a lake of fire, weighed down by the castle's iron, and the burden of the kings conceit.
Over the ages, the iron was stripped from the castle by the opportunistic passers-by.

This doesn't match the actual use of the key, and the iron door is not in the Iron Keep... But it's really interesting how the lowest part of the Forest of Fallen Giants has these streams of fire coming from down below, and Salamanders living there. The connection is obvious to me, that Iron Key was supposed to be found somewhere else, opened the Iron Door in the Forest, which revealed a path that descended into the Keep, via some sort of hole or elevator that is now missing from the Salamander Pit area.

I wonder why this change was made, as it makes a lot of geographic sense to have the Iron Keep below the Forest, instead of in a magical invisible lava land in the sky, which is also weird since a ton of Iron Keep-related descriptions make an emphasis on how the castle sank "down below", and the Old Iron King was "possessed by what lurks below" and such, so why would you take an elevator up to it?. You could explain the current location by saying the Keep was built on top of a volcano and it sunk into it, but it's still very strange that you cannot see anything like that from Harvest Valley.

It makes me wonder if other areas with geographical anomalies were also changed.

 

[80Maxwell08]

Well I just beat the 4 lords. Yeah this game is way easier with a ranged option.

 

[Invictus]

Mmm yeah well sounds like just adding a second mountain behind earthen peak or more simply having the elevator go down it would have saved a whole lot of problems

 

[Admiral jimbob]

they had the perfect opportunity for a Zany Drangleic Mine Cart Experience

 

[Zep Zepo]

If you join and then leave the Champions Covenant, does the difficulty return back to normal? My first play through I joined Way of Blue, then joined champions to get the tablet, the immediately went back and joined way of blue again.

Just wondering if I made it harder on myself by doing that?

Zep--

 

[Kanedias]

I went to check the old trailers and screenshots, and it's interesting that the Forest of Fallen Giants has much darker and warmer lighting with an emphasis on fire, and several of the trailers focus on the Salamander Pit when showing the Forest. In one of them (the Despair trailer, one of the earliest ones) an image of an Old Iron King-like monster even flashes on the screen just before showing said Salamander Pit!

Remember that when we were discussing the graphics it was mentioned that the art design of the Forest of Fallen Giants had changed? Could this be why?

 

[praetor]

at least DaS1 had only 1 bullshit mechanic (backstab [fishing] + hornet ring). DaS2 keeps showing a new retarded mechanic every week:


yeah... throw some dung pies, and run around exploding with the sun ring (and ring of thorns, while we're at it). is there some way to farm elisabeth mushrooms? no matter, high end lifegems are good enough. jesus, who the fuck at from came up with the brilliant idea to make physical scaling almost worthless (only some very good scaling weapons are worth it [while others aren't.. f.e. Chaos Blade is def not worth the 15Dex despite having A scaling]. and completely worthless for quality builds), make infusions 9 times out of 10 be better at pretty much base stats than str/dex/quality non-infused at soft caps (i.e. casters are better at melee than melee builds, most of the time), make them buffable and then insert not 1, but 2 rings that make melee an even stupider idea? sorry DragoFireheart , but this isn't From trying to improve the balance, it's them totally fucking it up in favour of (sometimes gimmicky) bullshit. there's still hope 'cause there hasn't been a single balance patch so far and DaS1 has changed quite a bit over time. fingers crossed (f.e. one way to balance these rings would be to make them break after they procced... easy, logical, but somehow went over From's head... as usual)

 

[Hobo Elf]

You assume too much that FROM balances the game around PvP which has hardly ever been the case. They only made a few PvP changes in DaS, DWGR being the major one. Everything else you complain about is mostly moot for PvE which is the main drive of the game as far as FROM and the majority of players are concerned about. As long as it is entirely possible to beat the game as Fashion Souls then all statistical problems are of little consequence in PvE.

 

[Morgoth]

https://twitter.com/bradshoemaker/status/451867629423054848

PC version coverage next week.

 

[Tribal Sarah]

i wish they would fix their servers. they've been shit for years, but i hoped that this time the summoning thing would actually work. lel.

 

[aris]

You assume too much that FROM balances the game around PvP which has hardly ever been the case. They only made a few PvP changes in DaS, DWGR being the major one. Everything else you complain about is mostly moot for PvE which is the main drive of the game as far as FROM and the majority of players are concerned about. As long as it is entirely possible to beat the game as Fashion Souls then all statistical problems are of little consequence in PvE.

Yep, DS is first and foremost a PvE game, not PvP

 

[praetor]

You assume too much that FROM balances the game around PvP which has hardly ever been the case. They only made a few PvP changes in DaS, DWGR being the major one. Everything else you complain about is mostly moot for PvE which is the main drive of the game as far as FROM and the majority of players are concerned about. As long as it is entirely possible to beat the game as Fashion Souls then all statistical problems are of little consequence in PvE.

greatsword speed nerf (inconsequential for PvE), Fog ring (inconsequential for PvE), elemental nerfs, just to name a few... it's possible to beat the game with the ladle. it was possible to beat it with a broken sword in DaS1. there is no OP shit in PvE 'cause everything is OP because the AI is dumb as fuck. and they care about PvP. hell, they want you to engage in it so much that you can't farm for covenant items anymore, and the higher ranks for the PvP covenants require egregious amounts of multiplayer time. they want people to engage in the multiplayer aspects, hell they even stated so in the interviews for DaS2 and it was the main reason behind the covenant overhauls. it's even obvious from the changes to dex, str, pyro, cast speed, etc they tried to listen to the DaS1 PvP community and fix what was broken... and then introduced even more bullshit that makes DaS1 look like Street Fighter 2

edit: btw, i don't think anybody expects (ok, maybe a few delusional PvPers) From to balance the game around PvP or to perfectly balance the game as a pro fighter game for tournamets. just no super broken shit in PvP that completely takes away the fun out of it, because even the shorbow is "broken" in PvE if you have more than 2 functioning neurons

edit 2:

i wish they would fix their servers. they've been shit for years, but i hoped that this time the summoning thing would actually work. lel.

despite what they led us to believe, pretty much only message pushing and matchmaking happen on those dedicated servers (and they're retarded enough to put Australia in with Europe, apparently), everything else is still P2P. and their netcode is the worse so far in the series

 

[Hobo Elf]

edit: btw, i don't think anybody expects (ok, maybe a few delusional PvPers) From to balance the game around PvP or to perfectly balance the game as a pro fighter game for tournamets. just no super broken shit in PvP that completely takes away the fun out of it, because even the shorbow is "broken" in PvE if you have more than 2 functioning neurons

This is the crux in your argument that I don't agree with.

We are looking at PvP in Souls from two completely different points of view. Maybe you see it more as a duel between individuals that is intended to be fun like fencing in sport, but that has never been the case or what was intended. PvP is very unfair and that was always the intention. It's easier to analyze PvP if we look at DeS, which is more raw, but DaS is mostly the same just painted with some LARP to give it more flavor. PvP was just a mechanic to get back your 50% health. If you died you could either be a real nice guy and help someone who is struggling to get to the next fog gate, or you could be a vicious thug and invade someone to murder them in cold blood. I don't think FROM ever intended this to be a fun event for both parties, only the invader. The bonus of killing or helping someone isn't as great in DaS as it is in DeS because the penalty of death isn't nearly as severe, but the main philosophy of the idea is still the same even if they have all kinds of LARPy covenants.

I know a lot of people think of PvP as hanging out in 4-1 or the 'burg and waiting for someone to invade you, but that was not something intended by FROM when they designed invasions and PvP in these games. PvP was always about wolves invading sheep and it's a ruthless hunt for blood.

Plus when you remove all the crazy and broken stuff in these games you end up with PvP that's nothing but two guys whose main goal is to penetrate the other guy from his behind.