Regen ring / abundance of lifegems: The regen ring specifically is there to give new players a leg-up in the early game. The regen effect is pretty slow and not useful for anyone with decent armor, high adaptability, a greatshield, high vigor or possibly all four. But for someone without any of that or an inexperienced player in general (DS2 was a lot of people's first foray into the series), having a crutch like that was a Godsend at the beginning, comparable to the drake sword in the previous game. Lifegems are everywhere and basically supplant the estus system because you take damage more often in DS2 than the other games, relative to skill level. Agility means you'll get clipped a lot while rolling until you've got a hefty investment in adp, no classes start with shields that have 100% physical block and DS2 gets trickier with poison and other damage over time effects (Smelter Demons for instance) than any other game in the series. Weirdly enough, an excess of healing items allowed b-team to prevent the game from being too easy at the outset.
No. All it does is encourage degenerate waiting gameplay. Barely survive a fight? Just wait lol. It helps to completely obliterate the resource management aspect. Healing in Dark Souls was good precisely because outside of a few rare consumables, your health was irrevocably limited by your number of estus flasks. This meant that every hit you took mattered. This is made worse by lifegems which can be bought (and held) in virtually unlimited quantities for relatively cheap. DS2 has to compensate for this lack of consequence by upping the difficulty of every encounter by a factor of ten, which is why so many things in this game have extreme HP pools and ridiculous attacks - they are compensating for a problem they themselves created, and are doing a bad job in the process.
DS2 made the individual combats harder, but only because it completely removed one of the most important aspects of resource management in the original game. Now, if you want to play optimally, it's a boring game of surviving combat and then waiting.
Ironically, if they wanted to ACTUALLY make the game harder, they could have removed all of the degenerate strategies present in the original - namely getting enemies stuck and killing them with a bow, running outside of their aggro range, etc etc. None of these were fixed and in fact were made worse in the DLCs because there are multiple elevators you can stand underneath, which AI won't path into.
This is a classic case of not understanding the core problem and just upping the enemy stats in a vain attempt to fix the difficulty issues they created/exacerbated.
I agree that the Regen Ring was added to make the game easier for newer players, similar to the Drake Sword. Unlike the ring, however, the Drake Sword doesn't undermine the core mechanics of the game.
DS3 had this same issue with it's Divine items. At least it was merciful enough to make players wait for a while before giving them out, so there was at least some challenge initially.
Movement: I agree that the movement 'snap' or whatever people call it is annoying, but it's also easily compensated for and if it results in more than a couple of deaths, you're actively trying not to adjust. It's a non-issue in combat, since this isn't Nioh and footsies don't come into play, especially if you lock-on. For what it's worth, I agree that the platforming sucks, but that's a recurring problem for the series and not something I'd lay at b-team's door.
You'd have a point if the movement wasn't DEMONSTRABLY worse than in DS1. Literally all they had to do was port over the controls exactly. It wouldn't have been great, but would have been serviceable, as it is in DS1. Instead they made it worse. Because they made everything worse.
Fragrant Branches of Yore / permanently missing items or paths: Making items permanently unavailable, encouraging subsequent playthroughs and discouraging the "I've got to get 100%" mindset is one of the best elements of DS2, not a problem to be fixed. So far as the branches themselves are concerned? I could see them not being everyone's cup of tea ("I want to see the new area now!"), but they make more sense if you look at them as carrying on the tradition of ability-based gates in games like Metroid or Castlevania or weird-key doors in things like Resident Evil or Devil May Cry.
You have missed my point.
My point is not that fragrant branches are a bad mechanic inherently. I think they are fine.
The issue is that there are enough fragrant branches to unlock everything in 1 playthrough, but only if you do them in the correct order, because some branches lead to other branches. This order is not specified anywhere, so it's essentially blind luck whether or not a player finds everything or not.
This isn't some tactical decision based on player choice that allows players to make different decisions on replays to get different rewards, and it's not comparable to an ability gate because it's not based on player build or decisionmaking whatsoever. It's purely luck. It's basically saying "oh, you missed something because you did it in the wrong order, better luck next time, bucko!".
That's not replayability, that's just annoying. The player is being arbitrarily punished through no fault of their own for the crime of not looking at a wiki article for the right order.
Beyond their first playthrough, there's no reason any player would ever do the branches in any order other than the optimal one. Even if you think this adds "replayability", it lasts for a maximum of 1 playthrough.
Boss hitboxes / boss rooms: I've never bought the thing about DS2 hitboxes, except in extreme cases like dlc bosses whiffing grab attacks, but then suddenly connecting. The issue largely (but again, not completely) stems from the early days of the game's life where no one understood adp / agility. To be fair, this is From's fault as much as anyone. Adp is poorly explained in-game and (I think I mentioned this earlier in the thread, but it's funny so it bears repeating) the "official" FuturePress guide (that hired 'hardcore fans' as writers) writes off the stat as almost worthless (I shit you not: "Raising adaptability evenly with endurance increases your innate poise." Thank you, washed-up youtuber.) As a result the issue was blown out of proportion. There are certainly issues, but they're not as prevalent as fan backlash suggests and are usually easily countered with high agility or a sturdy greatshield. Boss rooms on the other hand are definitely a mixed bag. Most are pretty good, but Guardian / Ancient Dragons, Bell Gargoyles & Smelter Demon can all be infuriating as the bosses are either too big or too numerous to keep track of.
People overexaggerating the issue doesn't make it an invalid complaint. There are countless of examples of the hitboxes just being plain bad in many cases throughout the entire series, and ADP has nothing to do with it, other than making it even worse at low ADP levels.
I have seen countless videos of a boss thrusting, the character diving past it, then teleporting to the end of the blade. The pursuer is particularly bad for this.
Scholar Edition: Looked at in context, Scholar is pretty good. It's Master Quest, but for DS2, and offers a lot of surprises and mix-ups for those of us who played the original too much. As a stand-alone release though, I completely agree and it's fucking gay that it supplanted vanilla DS2.
It doesn't help that FROM marketed it as "the definitive edition" and outright tells you on the original's Steam page to buy SOTFS instead.
But even as a "Mario Kaizo" sort of thing, it's still bad. There are some positive aspects and some improvements - proper darkness making the torch useful and implementing the DLC items into the world rather than having them magically teleport into your inventory are good changes (although there's no reason why this wasn't done in the original in the first place), but the enemy placements are just bad. There's no rhyme or reason to it. Everything is increased by an order of magnitude to the point where tiny side rooms will contain 10-15 random enemies for no reason, old bosses are copy pasted into new areas where they don't work well, and in general it just comes across as really lazy, like they considered the original version too easy (probably because of the absolutely broken healing mechanics) and decided to add in more stuff to increase the difficulty.
Also, having to pay for integrated DLC and 64-bit support is unforgivable.
as a dark souls ripoff, even though it’s a bit too silly to take seriously. I’m really happy to see that the lords of the fallen devs have humbled themselves, gone back to the drawing board and actually released something worth playing for once.
