From Software The Dark Souls II Megathread™

[Wirdschowerdn]

Looks identical to the PC DX9 version.

No upgrade needed.

Edit: Also, throwing more dudes at you doesn't make a better or more difficult Souls experience. That's just lazy design.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

That's just lazy design.

Can be said about half the content in this game, unfortunately.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Aye. But I still got more fun out of it than 90% of all other games.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

While the game has plenty of shit encounters where there's a gangbang of enemies in a room/corridor, FoFG isn't really a good example of that.

There's a lot of ambushes which can be prevented if you pay attention. That video is the worst example ever. If you're careful, you're gonna be fighting 2-3 mobs at most.

 

[Jaedar]

It's funny to see consoletards slobber over graphical improvements PC has had all the time

Anyone know of any list or w/e with the new item placements?

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

That's just lazy design.

Can be said about half the content in this game, unfortunately.

Hmm?

Almost all of the content is much better thought out and more tightly designed than it's predecessors.

Encounters with multiple enemies usually give the player some sort of environmental advantage to press against the foes be it chokepoints, powder kegs, traps, or cover. And many multi-enemy encounters have a lot of inter-enemy synergy going on that justifies multiple foes. The whole meme of "DkS2 just threw enemies at the player" is dumb, especially when DkS1 had extremely lazy enemy placement of the sort where 3+ dudes would just be hanging around in an area, waiting for the player to pull them one-by-one, in numerous areas (that's basically the entire methodology of encounter design in Anor Londo, Demon Ruins, as well as the latter parts of Blighttown and Darkroot).

Weapons, armor, and spells are all much better done too, with more interesting effects and meaningful differentiations. Stuff like Santier's Spear, self-buffing weapons, and weapons with viable "special" attacks are a welcome change from DkS1 blandness where many weapons had movesets unthinkingly copied from DeS, like clubs whose R2 was a jumping attack, the same exact attack made standard across all weapon is DkS1 via Forward+R2 inputs. Overlooking redundancies like this is lazy design.

Many more spells are better integrated into the core of timing and positioning and are thus more fun and rewarding to use than the crappy projectiles that made up most of DkS1's non-pyromancy spells. Soul Greatsword is probably the model of how Sorceries should be designed. And DkS2 pyromancy is really fun, having a lot more zoning options between the addition of "cloud" style spells (Flame Swath, Poision/Toxic/Acid Mist) and neat stuff like Lingering Flame.

And, save a few total stinkers (Ancient Dragon, Giant Lord, Vendrick), boss fights are, on average, leagues less lazy than DeS/DkS1. Bad bosses in Perfect Lord Sensei Miyazaki-san's unquestionable masterpieces were truly terrible; there's just no salvaging things like Ceaseless Discharge, Bed of Chaos, Dragon God, Storm King, Hydras, Hellkite Drake, Armor Spider, and so on. And many were the definition of lazy.

Take Pinwheel, for instance. It has only one attack, a magical projectile, and it's duplication ability. It doesn't even have the nifty little gimmick that Fool's Idol had of "resurrecting" if the player didn't kill it's worshiping supplicant. Terrible, low effort boss that players simply steamroll, what with no depth whatsoever.

Or try Priscilla. Once her gimmick has been figured out, she's completely one-dimension in how she can attack the player, having only a couple of extremely slow scythe swings, and little ability to close the distance. Interesting the first time you face her, but dreadfully boring every time thereafter. Hell, that describes a whole lot of DeS/DkS1 bosses...gimmicks with a short shelf-life.

Now compare them to a much maligned DkS2 boss, Covetous Demon.

Covetous Demon is actually a pretty interesting design; all of its attacks are designed around the being's corpulence, what with the body slams, rollovers, and flopping attacks (which, by the way, can be mixed up pretty well; a half-roll can easily transfer into a flop in order to surprise players. This behavior is a bit more noticeable on the Crown of the Ivory King version). It has a unique attack where it can eat the player and spit them out with all of their gear unequipped. And in the Earthen Peak encounter, there are jars hanging in the roof of the room, that when shot with a projectile/spell of significant strength, will drop a Hollow, which the Demon will rush to consume, ignoring the player to satisfy its gluttonous urges. It's a pretty detailed fight, and in no way lazy.

Basically the main flaw of the fight was that it wasn't tuned well enough difficulty-wise, that it wasn't enough to satisfy the challenge junkies that make up a huge portion of the Souls fanbase (to say nothing of how hard it would be to design early-game bosses to stress multi-game veterans, especially in a series like the Souls games that pretty much adds/changes little of the already simple core mechanics).

All-in-all, calling Dark Souls 2 content lazy is just that...an effortless, meaningless criticism. Certainly there are many flaws (though most of them permeate the previous games just as much, even if revisionists do their damnedest to pass them off), but this isn't a credited critique in any way, yet it certainly has a whole lot of traction among the "DkS2 is mediocre/worse than DkS1" crowds.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Wait, hold on. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Armor Spider. If anything I'd say it is one of the better designed boss encounters. Instead of another bland, open arena with a primitive tank and spank boss, the environment was a bottleneck that worked against the player and the Armor Spider had a few nasty projectiles to complement the bottleneck. A pretty interesting fight that really forces the noob to learn to dodge or suffer.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

My first encounter with armor spider - hold purple flame shield up then attack when he's down. When my health got low, I munched on 1000000 bunches of grass I had. The boss is too static and a shield with fire resist shuts it down.
Flamelurker should've been the archdemon.
Leechmonger and Dirty Colossus are absolute shit too.
Astraea is a gimmick and not really a boss. Old Monk is a gimmick too - playing this shit offline was lame.

You really have Phalanx, Tower Knight, Penetrator, Allant, Flamelurker, (maybe) Fat Bird Dude, Old Hero (too easy) and Maneaters.

Shit like Sinh/Ivory King/Fume Knight beat the shit out of anything DeS has.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

That's just lazy design.

Can be said about half the content in this game, unfortunately.

All-in-all, calling Dark Souls 2 content lazy is just that...an effortless, meaningless criticism. Certainly there are many flaws (though most of them permeate the previous games just as much, even if revisionists do their damnedest to pass them off), but this isn't a credited critique in any way, yet it certainly has a whole lot of traction among the "DkS2 is mediocre/worse than DkS1" crowds.

You are conviniently skipping all the rehashed content that DS2 is infamous for, which is the very definition of lazy design in my book.

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

That's just lazy design.

Can be said about half the content in this game, unfortunately.

All-in-all, calling Dark Souls 2 content lazy is just that...an effortless, meaningless criticism. Certainly there are many flaws (though most of them permeate the previous games just as much, even if revisionists do their damnedest to pass them off), but this isn't a credited critique in any way, yet it certainly has a whole lot of traction among the "DkS2 is mediocre/worse than DkS1" crowds.

You are conviniently skipping all the rehashed content that DS2 is infamous for, which is the very definition of lazy design in my book.

what rehashed content? did you mean ornstein fight?
i thought that the latest trend on reddit/4chan/neogaf is to call Des/Das bosses better looking than the DaS2 bosses... the old "they are all just big knights" was dropped couple months ago when someone finally noticed that only 14 out of 41 bosses in DaS2 are actually big knights and Alonne/Fume/Ivory King are as good as Artorias/O&S/Gwynn

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

You are conviniently skipping all the rehashed content that DS2 is infamous for, which is the very definition of lazy design in my book.

This critique isn't exclusive to Dark Souls 2, though. The first Dark Souls is just as guilty, if not more so, of these sorts of practices.

Both games rehash content internally to some degree. That is to say, enemies and bosses within the title are used in more than one area and perhaps fought multiple times. Asylum Demon shows up a few times. Capra/Taurus Demon, Gargoyles, Moonlight Butterflies, and Pinwheel all serve as regular enemies later in the game. The entire bestiary of the Duke's Archives, save the Transformed Maidens, are recycled from earlier areas. Dark Souls 2 does this with about the same frequency. While more unique content would be preferable, this is a rather inoffensive practice...it's not as though most of the recycled enemies/bosses are extremely linear, boring affairs that aren't fun to fight more than once.

And both games draw from their predecessors as well. To beat DkS2 over the head for Old Dragonslayer and the Belfry Gargoyles, yet not criticize DkS1 for lifting Phalanx, Vanguard, Fool's Idol, and Maneaters wholesale from DeS would be remiss (an argument could easily be made that Iron Golem is simply Tower Knight with a ring out mechanic...but, well, I'll address that later). As long as the Souls games have been a series, they've been bringing back popular/iconic boss fights. In fact, both proportionately and absolutely, more DkS1 bosses are "rehashed" from previous games than DkS2 bosses.

Of course, a lot of DkS1 partisans trot out the absurd "reskin" retort, making spurious arguments about how every boss is just a reskin of bosses in previous games of the serious, having a comically low threshold for what constitutes a "reskin". Bosses that share a couple of attacks with something in a series predecessor? Reskin! Something that shares visual motifs with a previous boss, but has a distinct fighting style? Still a reskin! Bosses that have even a tangential similarity to another one? Goddamn reskins!

Probably the most illustrative example of this phenomenon is people who call Najka a Quelaag clone just because they are both pale, dark-haired chicks with arachnid lower bodies, completely ignoring how differently they fight. Quelaag is pyromancer and her magic casts slowly, leaving her vulnerable to punishment, but persists on the battlefield. Najka is a sorceress, whose Homing Soul Spears can be stacked with her other attacks, not opening her up to numerous frames of retaliation. Everyone's favorite Chaos Witch attacks mostly with sweeps and slashes, whereas the offense of the Scorpioness is mainly thrust-based. Quelaag protects her rear with explosions whereas Najka uses her twin-stingers (which can be destroyed with enough damage). Najka even has a cute little burrowing gimmick; nothing earth-shattering, but fun the first time you figure out how to avoid it (gimmicks aren't bad when the entire fight doesn't revolve around them).

Then you've got the absolutely absurd things, where DkS1 fans declare something like Ivory King, Fume Knight, or Sir Alonne to be Allant/Gwyn/Artorias clones because they share one or two moves. Or how Rat Authority and Aava are Sif clones solely because they are quadrupedal mammals; all three bosses play out very differently. It's nonsensical.

Apply the same (non)standards to DkS1 bosses and see how they fare. Let's look at Ornstein and Smough. The Captain of Gwyn's Knights has an offense that revolves around a homing dash and magical projectiles...total King Allant clone! And the Executioner is a fat guy wielding a hammer and that likes to do butt-slams. Sounds exactly like Vanguard! I guess B-Team was just following the lead of the flawless A-Team, huh?

The "rehash" argument isn't particularly strong, nor good evidence for the claim of DkS1>DkS2.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

Th-thanks Goatse Ring...

Spoiler

39k SM

 

[Gentle Player]

Probably the most illustrative example of this phenomenon is people who call Najka a Quelaag clone

Those people are clueless idiots. Fire spiders with a female upper half were mini-bosses in King's Field III. While we're at it: sword-wielding serpent-men were present in KF4, and guess where they were encountered? That's right, in a fortress full of traps. A powerful magical dragon named Seath was in KF3. In KF1, you were aided by a mysterious girl in green (a fairy, in this instance) and an ancient dragon whom she was in league with, both with ambiguous motivations. KF3 also featured female naga as mini-bosses - they looked almost exactly like the DS2 boss and used poison attacks. In KF2 and 3 the player was a pawn of two ancient beings who had corrupted powerful leaders; they were dragons, however, rather than snakes. In KF3, the ancient world was represented by a great tree. The player character in KF3 was Ostrava the son of a king who had gone mad, seduced by power, and had let monsters run amok in his crumbling kingdom - your mission was to confront him and stop his madness.

I could go on and on. Having recurring motifs is not necessarily rehashing. OMG JOSEPH CONRAD HACK WRITER, SEVERAL OF HIS NOVELS FEATURE SAILORS AND THE SEA!!

 

[Caim]

I just started playing Dark Souls 2 after enjoying the first one. There's a few differences to go around (no humanity is good, a finite number of Human Effigies in the game is bad) but I'm having fun so far. I've beaten the Last Giant and made my way to the third bonfire (in that circular room, past all the turtle knights).

But what's all this First Sin malarkey? I got the base game without any DLC on the PC, but what else can I expect from this new version? Will there be some kind of bundle with all that stuff in, or is that only in a new and complete version of the game?

 

[DragoFireheart]

My first encounter with armor spider - hold purple flame shield up then attack when he's down. When my health got low, I munched on 1000000 bunches of grass I had. The boss is too static and a shield with fire resist shuts it down.
Flamelurker should've been the archdemon.
Leechmonger and Dirty Colossus are absolute shit too.
Astraea is a gimmick and not really a boss. Old Monk is a gimmick too - playing this shit offline was lame.

You really have Phalanx, Tower Knight, Penetrator, Allant, Flamelurker, (maybe) Fat Bird Dude, Old Hero (too easy) and Maneaters.

Shit like Sinh/Ivory King/Fume Knight beat the shit out of anything DeS has.

Dark Souls 2 DLC bosses are vastly superior to 99% of the other series bosses.

Sinh and Sir Alonne stand out as fights I liked.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

But what's all this First Sin malarkey? I got the base game without any DLC on the PC, but what else can I expect from this new version? Will there be some kind of bundle with all that stuff in, or is that only in a new and complete version of the game?

It's like a director's cut version of the game with all the DLC stuff bundled and a switch to "current-gen" graphics. It comes out in April.

 

[Caim]

Alright, so unless I want to rebuy for the DirectX.11 version I should just get the DLC in its current $25 version or whenever Gaben blesses us with a discount.

I've been making my way through now, and unless I'm missing a critical item (something to open that bigass door) or some kind of door I simply cannot progress through the Forest of Fallen Giants. I found three bonfires, beaten the boss, found the cartographer, did the thing with whom I suspect is the new Patches and even managed to best the Pursuer. But where do I go from there? Should I look around there some more, or continue down that wharf area or find my way around Huntsman's Corpse?

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

Alright, so unless I want to rebuy for the DirectX.11 version I should just get the DLC in its current $25 version or whenever Gaben blesses us with a discount.

I've been making my way through now, and unless I'm missing a critical item (something to open that bigass door) or some kind of door I simply cannot progress through the Forest of Fallen Giants. I found three bonfires, beaten the boss, found the cartographer, did the thing with whom I suspect is the new Patches and even managed to best the Pursuer. But where do I go from there? Should I look around there some more, or continue down that wharf area or find my way around Huntsman's Corpse?

to open kings gate you need ring that you will find much later in game. either go heide->wharf->lost bastille/majula pit->grave of siants->gutter/huntsman corpse->harvest valley or check once again around Pursuers battlefield

get those dlc as soon as they are on some sales. they are for the most part better than the main game

 

[Jezal_k23]

Hey, I just have to ask, as an owner of DS2 + all of its DLC, am I going to have to buy Scholar of the First Sin? Also, is it gonna have the sweet shadowing missing from vanilla DS2?

 

[Gozma]

I think the thing that bugged me most about DS2 vanilla is that I felt like I had to do a lot of pulling and leash exploiting. Like the stairs in front of the Ancient Dragon, the two giants at the bottom of the green and black poison spitting statue area... probably more shit I'm forgetting. Am I forgetting places in DS1 I had to do that? I'm pretty sure I never messed with full blown leash exploiting. I guess anywhere with the giant spear and shield golems in Anor Londo really encouraged pulling but they were all for one-time chests and things like that. Wait shit the rolling catbear things, I leashed the fuck out of those. Guys I think it's that I played DS1 a while back and had time to forget that shit before I played DS2.

One other thing I'll say for sure about the DS2 vs. DS1 thing is that if DS1 didn't have those tightrope walking areas but DS2 did (instead of the reverse) people would shit on it endlessly

Wait the point of this post to start with was that I wanna hear people talk about the new enemy placements because I think there's a ton of room for improvement there

 

[toro]

Wait the point of this post to start with was that I wanna hear people talk about the new enemy placements because I think there's a ton of room for improvement there

Not really. Rearranging enemies in a boring world (aka too many corridors) will not have the same impact as rearranging the actual world.

In other words, the improvement will be minimal. In fact new enemy placements can be worse if they go for scary jumps placements.

 

[UndetectedButthurt]

Hey, I just have to ask, as an owner of DS2 + all of its DLC, am I going to have to buy Scholar of the First Sin? Also, is it gonna have the sweet shadowing missing from vanilla DS2?

They might offer a discount but there's not gonna be any crazy graphical improvements. Previews show more dark areas and better contrast. Devs are promising better textures and higher polygon count or something.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Namco registered "Soldiers' Soul"

http://it.ign.com/dark-souls-ii-xbox-360/93333/news/bandai-namco-registra-il-marchio-soldiers-souls
https://oami.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/013736228

I'll buy any Souls game like a servile customer sheep.

 

[Caim]

I think I'm going to have to switch off my internet when going through the areas run by the Rat King, because this is just crap. People teleporting halfway across the room to backstab me, hits not registering on the normal rats and having laggy movement overall.

 

[DragoFireheart]

Namco registered "Soldiers' Soul"

http://it.ign.com/dark-souls-ii-xbox-360/93333/news/bandai-namco-registra-il-marchio-soldiers-souls
https://oami.europa.eu/eSearch/#details/trademarks/013736228

I'll buy any Souls game like a servile customer sheep.