Dark souls 2 makes me depressed

Okay /r9k/, don't shoot up your high school.

Too late to do that, I already graduated.

That was supposed to be rhetorical, you autist.

Dark Souls make it's name as a 'hard-yet-fair' game. Dark Souls 2 is frequently hard through being unfair.
It was put together by a B-team of Fromsoft employees while the talented staff were off making Bloodborne.
Especially compared to DS1, the maps are immensely linear. The areas themselves are very repetitive. Some incredibly lazy boss fights (you fought this guy? well how about… TWO of this guy???)

A search through youtube will find you many videos going through what makes DS2 a weak souls game. Don't be a lazy faggot.

It's made by a different team with different perception of what made Dark Souls such huge success, so it's a different game at it's core.
I hated it at first, but I learned to appreciate it as an actual next gen King's Field game, as opposed to being Souls game.

As someone already said ITT, just go play Dark Souls 3. It's not as good as DeS or DaS1, but it does serve as good fuckhuge expansion pack for it. It's a kind of sequel the were making back in 90s-early 00s.
Not entirely new, but different enough to be worth a playthrough.

It's also one of the most beautiful 3D games to date.

tbh if you're good at 3D Zelda games, you'll be good at Dark Souls. Every enemy is just wait, dodge, attack, repeat.

that's not the kind of emptiness i was talking about. the first game is thematically hopeless, but still feels like a grand adventure peppered with sorrow. it was compelling somehow. it was tragic and cathartic. it pounds your ass so that you feel like a hero for mastering its punishments and making it your bitch in the end.

the physical act of playing dark souls 2 is making me want to kill myself.

That's a pretty weak excuse since Demon's Souls was an actual next-gen King's Field and most King's Field games were better than DaS2

I just recently started playing it for the first time as well and I know exactly what you mean.

my advice is go fight a boss, it feels a lot more like playing a game then slowly killing yourself.

People compare souls franchise to KF because of settings and atmosphere, but gameplay is fundamentally different.
DS2 actually plays like a KF game with all the bullshit it has and how stats work in it.

I wouldn't agree with that, but that's purely subjective.

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why?

It has its merits, like stance system, or beautiful UI, but if you played other games and still think that DS2 is better, something is wrong with you.

I'm currently going through SoTFS for the first time myself.

It's truly horrible. The bosses come in two flavours of shit: the super easy shit bosses (all the 1vs1 encounters) and the annoyingly hard shit ones (the ones that start with minions and then keep spam spawning them all the time, see Gargoyles). The only good boss I have encountered so far is Smelter Demon. Copy-pasted Ornstein at low-level was a fucking awesome fight but it only shows how much better was the boss design in DS1. I'm 99% sure Smelter Demon was made by the DS1 team back then and cut from the first game, because the difference with the other bosses is abyssmal.

I was hyped for Drangleic Castle expecting it'd get better. I found room after room of cheap ambushes that you see coming from a mile but there is fuck-all you can do and a myriad copypastee minibosses that ended in a copypasted boss fight (2vs1, of course, how else could these idiots make a fight hard), and was then sent to a huge area full of water in a game without the Rusted Iron Ring.

Holy fucking shit, this is a fucking turd. Just beat DS1 for the first time a few weeks ago, and it's a damn masterpiece, I can't believe this turd of a sequel didn't get MORE hate.

It really doesn't, you can't control how you invest experience into separate stats in KF and no KF game is excessively linear. You also don't move like cold molasses in DaS2 and there's more to the magic system than just equipping rings. About the only comparison is how much they emphasize the abuse of circle-strafing but that's also true for DeS and DaS1

If you'd compare it to any previous game in the series it would be the first Shadow Tower because of the ludicrous weapon degradation and separate linear areas, but even ST was better

Anyone mind if I dump a DS1 comic?

Given that the devs thought that Soul Memory was a good system, I assume there's something about DS2 that you like, something specific. I probably can't fault you on that, but jesus, the design is fucking awful.

Firing off souls at your enemies that you can never get back and that count towards your PvP matchmaking. Jesus christ.

I'm doing a sorcerer playthrough right now and basically kicking the shit out of everything in my way with the starting gear. I've got my staff at +10 already and basically dance around every enemy and boss.

Still doesn't change the fact that every part of the game is garbage and practically killed the series.

fuck it

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Dark Souls 2 is shit, mate. Did you live under a rock during the graphics downgrade fiasco, or the Soul Memory debates?

Dark Souls 3 is just 2 + Bloodborne, meaning it's better than 2 but worse than BB or 1. My favorite is still Demon's Souls but that's largely for nostalgia at this point.

Who does these?

You can still like it, but don't ignore it's flaws. If you like skyrim seek professional help.

Not sure, I saved it off a site that does multiple Dark Souls comics by different artists. I like this one the most, but there is another good one with Lautrec and Solaire, the rest read like fanfiction

what's the site?

Lordran and Beyond, some of the comics are DeS and Bloodborne related but most of the content is DaS

Follow a guide, usually I'll play through a game myself before going back for a second playthrough and looking at all the things I missed but I couldn't be bothered to do that with DS2.

I found DS2 much more frustrating then 1 and 3, I think they got carried away with the whole "Dying" thing and there are allot of areas that are really annoying, not to mention weapon durability degrading twice as fast in Scholar of the first sin because its 60fps, I think that got patched though.

to tell you the truth, i barely looked into any of the games up until now. like i said, i owned and played ds1 a lot but sucked at it. i didn't go online and read about anything later in the game because i wanted it to be a fresh experience, and as for ds2 and ds3, i've completely avoided any and all information about them until i was ready to play them, which is right now, because i wanted to preserve the sense of discovery i got in ds1. i wanted everything i see to be the first time i experience it as i'm playing it.

as for ds3, do you guys really think i should get it? in what ways is it similar/different from ds1. what are things that are good from 1 that are present in 3? what things that are shit in 2, are present in 3?

of all the Dark games i find the second game easiest

Thats because it is the easiest. And the unfair bullshit was magnified with 3. They pmuch did the same shit das2 was criticized for. Whenever I press anons on why they dislike the games, they always give a laundry list of reasons, none of which they can back up with examples. It's getting to the point im pretty sure the majority saying it have never actually played dark souls 2 and just go into groupthink since actually playing vidya and forming their own opinions takes effort.

I like it more than the first purely because you're not forced to wear specific ugly pieces of armor to avoid being stunlocked to death by fast enemies. Poise was a mistake, I'm still amazed at all of the people wanting it back.

How dare you criticize the most awesomest most perfect game to have ever existed! It has LITERALLY no flaws, you're just too old to GET IT or then you just need to…

GIT…

…GUD!!! XDDD

Firstly, I’d like to ask director Tanimura to give an overview of the Dark Souls 2 design process. This was your first role as director and you had some difficult shoes to fill in those of Mr Miyazaki, who was really the cornerstone of both the previous entry Dark Souls and its spiritual prequel Demon’s Souls. On top of that it was the first direct sequel in the series. Was it as difficult as it sounds?

Tanimura: Yes, this game actually went through quite a troubled development process. Due to a number of factors we were actually forced to re-think the entire game midway into development. We really had to go back to the drawing board and think once more about what a Dark Souls game should be. It was at that point that I took on my current role, overseeing the entirety of the game including the art direction. To ensure we created the game both we and the fans wanted it was completely necessary, but it did of course create a problem. We had to decide what to do with the designs and maps that had been created up to that point. Ideally we’d start again from scratch but of course we were under time constraints so instead we had to figure out how to repurpose the designs in our newly reimagined game. This meant everything from deciding new roles for characters to finding ways to slot locations into the world map. This unusual development cycle faced us with an entirely different set of problems and looking back on the project as a whole it was at times, arduous. Although I’m confident that none of this will be felt by the players and I’m completely satisfied with the final product. So while I don’t think we need to dwell on it too much, in the interest of giving a full count of the development process it’s something we can’t avoid touching on.

from
http:// peterbarnard1984.tumblr.com/post/113163062955/dark-souls-2-design-works-translation

2 would be the easiest but was made hard through shit mechanics, doubling up on bosses and throwing fucking adds into fights.

There's even a boss that is literally just adds

Nito, church congregation, ornstein and smaugh, the undead in the crypts in 3. Your examples are literally in every other dark souls as well. Dumbass.

jew

ornstein and smaugh does not have adds, and I suspect what he means by "doubling up on bosses" is not "fight two guys at the same time" it's "fight this guy again but now there are billions of him". At least asylum, stray and sage were different in some ways, even though they were absolute lazy garbage.

also
Im sorry but I dont think you actually played DS1 to the point of actually understanding it

The problem with DS2 is it takes shit like Nito and takes it up to 11 by just having it be a skeleton adds battle. Skeleton Lords aren't even a real boss they're just an group of enemies. Then you have the Rat Vanguard and Rat Authority, Ruin Sentinels, the rotten, Freja, Congregation. All bosses that are either nothing but adds or have adds themselves, the only good one is Freja because you can use a torch in that fight to keep the spiders away from you.

Then you have a ton of other bosses like Twin Dragonriders and thrown watchers who aren't tough on their own but are only difficult because there's two of them. The difference between that and OnS is that OnS would actually be a challenging boss fight even if one of them was gone.

The Belfry Gargoyles just takes it over the edge by having 5 of them but since they're optional I'll give it a pass. The DLC actually tries to fix this by having less adds and less double ups.

You probably treat it the way some anons treat Evangelion. It's just a game, but you've offloaded a lot of emotional pain (from other things in your life) onto it and so it's become depressing by pure association. That's maybe what you call mystique.

I can't listen to the song that goes "when everything's meant to be broken dadadadad know who I am" for the same reason, because I listened to it on a road trip through Washington once when I was a teen, at exactly the point it really hit me how pathetic and lonely my life was. To me, it's become a reminder of a painful time in my life, but really, it's just a pop song.

You are fucking retarded holy fuck.

OnS are unique bosses that are in the same arena and not a copy paste of 5 ass demons or some other shit as it would be in Dark Souls 2.

OnS is a challenge but it's a good challenge as it comes at a turning point in the game for the player

Fighting either O or S solo wouldn't be a challenge at all. The only challenge comes from them trying to fuck your ass at the same time. The second phase of the fight no matter who you kill first is a total joke.

Unless "doubling up" has taken on a whole new meaning in the english vocabulaty ornstein and smaugh fit perfectly. As for throwing adds, nito literally does this, as does the church congragation in DaS3, which is an adds fight entirely. Then like you said, theres the miniboss the stray demon, and the undead big fucker that spawns adds that attacks you while he claws towards you in DaS3. The whole point is his argument is predicated on situations that are in every single dark souls game.

And all of these mechanics are in every iteration of dark souls. If your only complaint is "its hard because theres more than one", why arent you criticizing dark souls 1 or 3 for these same facts? And no Ornstein, or Smaugh would not be hard without the other. Theyre a joke alone. I dont even know what to say about you thinking twin dragonriders or the spider being hard. You sound like you're shit at playing games tbh. Those two bosses are jokes, even solo. A case can be made for Freja being hard, but once you learn her mechanics shes a joke too.
I need to clarify on this. You didnt actually have trouble with the skeleton lords did you? Theyre the easiest boss in the franchise.

Could only make this argument for dragon riders and ruin sentinels, and thats just because theyre part of an order that uses the same weapons, armors and techniques and the sentinels are living armor placed all over the castle, which is why they feature in different areas as regular enemies as well.

The animations are a lot better. It's essentially DaS1 in the BB engine. It does have its fair share of BS, but not from too many enemies. Some enemies are just 2fast4u and you're poiseless like in DeS. Weak points considered, it'll be a lot more fun than 2.

Just be honest and tell him it's Nu-Bloodborne. Why would you lie?

The series has only gone down hill after DS1.

I was referring more to how it felt then the level design.

Doesn't she kill him because he goes hallow? The comic doesn't really convey that.

finally someone that isn't dumb as hek

OP here
you guys comparing it to bloodborne as a good point or bad point doesn't mean much to me. i've only played bb once for like an hour, at a friends house when it came out. i have no experience with it.

For me, it wasn't so much the design of the bosses in DaS2 (haven't done dlc), but the reason you fought them pissed me off. Apart from Velstadt, Freyja, Lost Sinner, Pursuer, maybe Old Iron King,MAYBE Mytha(?), there is about no set up and no reason to give a shit about them. Then, the rest of the bosses are mostly giant animals (some in dumb places), or mindless shit.

Dark souls 1, most bosses had some story, either some set up, like the lord souls or an actual tale you could piece together from items and placements. The rest, (Iron golem, the demons and gargoyles at least make sense as to why they are there).

Though, I didn't play DaS2 extensively, so it's probable that I missed items and shit that explains some of the bosses. This is all ignoring how fighting the bosses actually plays.

DaSII was originally in development as another title, and halfway through its development the head director was canned and someone else came in as a replacement. When he showed up, the whole project was a mess, then suddenly they were told to take this broken, directionless project and make it into a Dark Souls game. The dev team had to scrap a lot of assets and work with what they had to meet their deadline. In short, this is why the game seems unpolished. It is. Initially, I hated it, but I've grown to like it for what it is. The major talking points have been talked to death, but for the umpteenth time, here we go:
Okay concept but poor execution; they should've made it so your spent souls contribute to your total and not accumulated souls. This, along with infinite enemy respawn, would've allowed players to control their ascent into higher tiers. That's all they really needed to do, and maybe throw in some algorithm that would manage invaders with high gear so they don't invade some poor newfag with a base level straight sword. I don't know how they could've done that, but Soul Memory was poorly done.
All of this ruined invasions as a concept, and the pvp shifted toward organized "fight clubs". Some hate it, some are alright with it, I think they should've either removed pvp all together or simply carried over DaSI's system
This isn't too bad, you have two different areas from the outset, but as you gradually collect souls, more areas open up to you; get the Silver Cat Ring and head to the gutter, or pay the toll to the prayer bitch and get her to open the way to Hunstman's Copse. Granted, I would've liked a return to DaSI's level design, but even III manages to be as linear as ever. At least the levels tend to have shortcuts and alternate pathways within them.
I don't get this complaint. DaSI had more "dudes in armor" or humanoid types than any other enemy type, so I don't understand what the people who make this "criticism" were expecting. I feel the final product has added enough variety.
In DaSI it was mostly pointless, unless you were using gimmick weapons with special R2s, so I guess it's nice that they thought to give this mechanic some actual point, but I'd rather they have just removed it entirely. It's more annoying than anything; by the time you get to Dragleic Castle you'll have more than enough weapons and materials that you can have at least a few back up weapons, not to mention there are spells you could use and a ring that slows weapon degradation if you really need it. I guess it was supposed to add some survival element, but it's never that much of a problem.
I like the Bonfire Ascetic, but I don't understand why enemies are made to eventually go extinct. It just ruins the player's ability to further build their character. Granted, there are a lot of zones with a lot of enemies, so you'll have to chew through a lot of monsters before you run out, but there's always the chance that you'll spend hours grinding a zone away and then lose your souls over a stupid mistake. The Company of Champions is a decent covenant, I suppose, so at least one good thing came out of it.
I hate them, I prefer the older ones, I'm glad they changed them back in DaSIII and I don't even waste my time trying to do them in DaSII.
Yet another pointless addition that could've had some actual use.
It's fine, it seems to be a better system than DaSI anyway. Even at the maximum level, your HP will only gradually refill, compared to I and III, in which you get instant HP. This is one of the few decent changes that they should've kept but didn't. Then again, in II you can just spam estus in order to make your HP replenish faster, so maybe it's better they returned to the old way.
Pointless item, given that you can be invaded while hollow. In DaSI, humanity controlled your multiplayer experience. In DaSII, human effigies just put yet another barrier in front of co-op, which is pointless.
Not much to be said, Bamco is shitty for pulling a fast one and they're shitty for making DX9 owners pay for access to DX11 version

So that's it. DaSII is a clusterfuck of half finished concepts and poor execution. Even so, there's some fun to be had there.

The point to take home is if you like fast combat, with little defensive thought out combat that is the norm in das1 then you'll like 3. But its nothing like DaS1. It plays like Bloodborne. Its incredibly linear, they changed poise so armor is useless and your stam breaks so quickly when blocking you're in incredible danger of getting riposted like a backstab and taking massive damage. The game prioritizes dodging like in Bloodborne and wearing light clothes. It prioritizes quick weapons too, but not too quick like daggers or the caestus, because they get fucked by the bloodborne poise just like the two handers do. If you get it dont expect Dark Souls, expect bloodborne. Its far closer to Bloodborne in terms of combat, weapon speed, dodging instead of blocking and being defensive and far more linear like Bloodborne compared to 1 which had the map that let you branch out everywhere.

I feel like DS2 is the most well rounded game of the three. I also like the gameplay mechanics in it.
DS1 shits the bed halfway through and DS3 feels linear as fuck.

OnS are not doubling up, since they are two completely different bosses, with unique move sets that you met for the first time in the game and were not repeated. Also, I'm only defending the first game. I also never said you were wrong about Nito, but I see why you would bring him up again, since you are desperately trying to find anything you can to defend your shit opinions.

damn op, it sure sounds like a hardcore game for hardcore gamers such as yourself

There are enemies that never run out.

Which enemies are those?

Stone soldiers in the castle, there are like 8 of them right next to the bonfire.

Okay, fair enough, but all the other enemies in every other area will completely vanish unless you use a Bonfire Ascetic to bring them back. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to spend an extended amount of time killing those stone soldiers over and over. It's just dull and tedious. Yeah, you can do it, but in the first game you at least had some variety. You could go to Anor Londo and parry Silver Knights for an easy 1000 souls, or you could go and fight Darkwraiths in New Londo for the same. If you got bored with that you could go to Valley of the Drakes and fight the blue drakes there, or you could go to Oolacile and fight the giant stone guardians. Point I'm making is that grinding for souls to build your character is a dull process to begin with; it's going to be even more dull if you have only one enemy type to fight.

Just like killing any other enemy over and over.
Burning ascetics also increases the amount of souls enemies drop so its even more painless than in Dark Souls 1.

It was obvious "doubling up" meant a tag team enemy fight. Whether theyre the same type of enemy or night, Ornstein and Smaugh are still a tag-team fight and I mentioned nito because you mentioned adds and conveniantly left out one of the four lords who surprise surprise, uses adds. But of course you got to act like im desperate and try to change the conversation into character attacks, as your argument doesnt have a leg to stand on.

i fucking hated this game

Well, I agree about the Bonfire Ascetics, but are you implying that you think that it's fine for enemies to just randomly disappear without any reason? Why?

No, the enemies not respawning anymore was a stupid idea, and could hurt farming armors. I dont know why they didnt keep it like DaS1. Course I wonder the same about the covenants too, but what can you do?

They don't "randomly disappear"
They stop respawning after you've killed the same spawn 7 times.
Its an anti grinding feature as you cannot even burn ascetics to unless you kill the area boss

They start respawning again if you burn an ascetic. You can farm ascetics easily.

it's actually 15 times.
That you like. Fine, you like it. Why? I don't, I think it's shit. I've already explained why. The Bonfire Ascetics are an interesting feature, but I don't like being forced to used them, I want to choose to use them. Why the fuck would they deliberately implement an anti-grinding feature in a game that's all about grinding?
It's a good covenant, but you have to leave the covenant that you're already in just to bring all the enemies back. It's inconvenient.

To this day i am still confused.

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shitter detected

(you)'re a dipshit if you don't realize that the entire game loop revolves around building your character. How do you go about doing that, I wonder? Oh, that's right! You repeatedly slaughter an endless supply of enemies until you've acquired enough resources to pour into your stats, armor, weapons, or consumables. Don't be a dipshit.

So, you going to go back to not defending your stance on the enemies that don't spawn, or are you going to devolve into pointless shitposting?

You realize you can do that without grinding, right? You don't need to continually respawn and kill the same enemies to build a viable character. You sound like a shitter

It doesn't
Memorizing enemy patterns go a longer way than grinding ever will.
You just sound like a shitter in denial.

I always love the Onion Knight tale. The part when she finally killed her father made me shed some tears for the poor guy and his daughter. This comic is great.

So, why is it that you think it's fine that enemies eventually stop spawning?

Maybe if you were this paranoid in video games you wouldn't be wasting your life grinding for diminishing returns

I don't care about enemies not respawning because I don't spend 15 runs in a single area killing everything. Its just 3 runs to get to the boss and then running past any enemy to make the boss run.
Even if you want to grind I fail to see how bonfire ascetics are not a superior system considering not only do the enemies drop more souls, it also spawns more enemies present only in NG+.

It's to force you to either move on to new areas or use an item to make the enemies come back, but more dangerous. That was shitters like you can't grind all fucking day because you're not good enough to progress without pumping up your stats

The enemies in the first game still remain even after the boss is defeated, so they act as a source of souls, and you can acquire various items from them, like their weaponry, armor, and consumable items. In DaSII, these enemies will disappear, which is fucking pointless. What's the point? You say it's anti grinding mechanism, but that's fucking retarded when the entire revolves around grinding. If you just want to beat the game, yeah, you don't have to grind, but if you want to build your character so that they can use a variety of spells and weapons, then you have to acquire enough souls to meet this goal. This requires a grind. The bonfire ascetic increases the "difficulty" of any given area by making the enemies NG+ difficulty. This adds new phantoms in some areas, and the boss always comes back. If you're just interested in grinding, then it's fucking stupid to make the enemies do more damage and become even spongier than before just so you can have a chance a getting their drops or at getting marginal increase in souls.

You can still have the bonfire ascetics, they're better solution than forcing players to actually go into NG+, but I don't see the point in making enemies vanish. You have can both.

We have already established that is not the case and you are just a shitter and your new post just makes a stronger case of you being one.

No it doesn't
There are a few ways around this. You could build a new character, respec, or build specifically to use a variety of stuff. None of these require grinding unless you're autistic and need one character to be able to use absolutely everything.
There are items that increase the drop rate. Git gud

Like the other Souls games, the story and directive gets lost on me and only the get-past-this-area remains. I've not played the third and won't until their complete edition surfaces. I just finished Scholar of the First Sin and that feeling of directionless was very high, and I restarted the game until I found a build I liked and only because of this I was able to get some familiarity of what to do. It is a harder game than DS1, which I was able to finish on SL1, DS2 nearly requires co-op to get past some bosses. I suppose you could repeatedly grind away and bonfire aesthetic your way until you plowed through, but that seems to end your chances of co-op because of soul memory. Overall, I liked it and will play it again after beating it, and still haven't touched the included DLC so I will next run. Mastery takes longer in DS2, but that will make you a better gamer in the long run. It is nice to have a challenge. There is a lack of intrigue in many of the aspects and personally I think they made the world a little too big and too various as weird as that sounds. Demons' still strikes me as the right balance.

What else is new.
Let me reiterate. Enemies drop items in addition to souls. The object of the game - completing the bosses - does not require a grind, however, obtaining all of the items and building your character to their fullest does.
It is the case. There are people who have completed the game at SL1. I understand that you can complete the game without building your character. However, you can't build your character or complete your arsenal of weapons and outfits without spending a large amount of time grinding. If you deny this, you're just wrong. I don't want to build a new character. I want to use my initial character. I don't want to increase the damage output and defense of enemies should already exist. It's nice to have the option to do so, but I shouldn't be forced to it.

It's a very simple concept, and you're deliberately being willfully ignorant.

Enjoy your completely gimped roll.
Something the average player is not going to find on their first run unless they're a guide-reading homo, it's pretty damn easy to just walk right by the first living tree that blocks the path to it and never think to check that area again. It's also still not enough by itself to tank a single R1 from the majority of 2H weapons or most monster attacks.
A completely false statement, I guess? PVE I'm sure it's possible, but not for the average blind player. The dogs alone are absolute hell with 0 poise. PvP is just patently false, good fucking luck sporting 0 poise in Lagstab Souls 1. I played it enough to finish NG with zero summons, so unless you're going to argue that I "played it the wrong way" like a total autist then I did understand it enough to finish it.

You can perceive, with your sixth sense maybe, what could have been.

Scholar of the First Sin made the game feel less like a shitty MMO dungeon to me at least. There are some retarded encounters added but key areas receive new gimmicks other than "has loads of enemies". I find it's less tiring to play in general. I don't know, man, maybe give that version a shot.

Did you stop reading after the second line? You get items that increase the drop rate you fucking retard. It's almost like you can influence your ability to get shit from enemies if you learn to play the game.
Yes you can. You get plenty of souls from normal progression. You don't need to continually respawn and kill the same enemies to build your character unless you're autistic and don't consider them built until they can use absolutely everything.
NG+ or drop your summon sign. You'll get more souls at a much faster rate from helping with bosses than you would with grinding basic enemies.

Even with it, it's still going to take you a while to get every single armor piece, and good luck getting them all before the enemies all begin to disappear. I had to use multiple bonfire ascetics to get the majority of the outfits in the game. Why? That's fucking retarded. There's no good reason the enemies should despawn.
You're just being disingenuous. You know very well that you're not going to get enough souls to max out multiple weapons and armor sets to their highest quality and build your character so that they can be effective in all the ways the game allows you to play.
Yeah, fine, but that's not going to be around forever. Eventually, the servers will die and I'll have to rely on grinding.

Pop a coin to boost it even higher. Put on the other shit that raises the drop rate. Let go of your autism. Start NG+. All of these are viable strategies. Enemies despawning to force shitters to move forward at the expense of preventing players from getting drops without burning an item or going into NG+ is a net gain any way you look at it.
There's a difference between a built character and a maxed out one. You're going to need to go through a few NG+ cycles if you want to do that in anything resembling a timely manner, removing the need to grind.
Then it's a good thing NG+ is an integral part of the game.

Face it, you just can't accept when someone thinks differently than you. There's no reason why enemies should despawn.
that's retarded
No
No
No, I can use Silver serpent ring, the merchant's outfit, and whatever other items that increase your net souls.

I'm fine with bonfire ascetics and co-op for character progression, but it's retarded that enemies despawn, because not everyone is going to want to make the entire area stronger just so they can get their hands on one specific armor/weapon.

Your only argument is muh drops and you're given plenty of tools to get those without endless enemy respawns.
Good fucking luck with that. There aren't enough souls in a single cycle to get there. You're going to need hundreds of millions of souls.

Yeah, nah, why would anyone need to do that when co-op is a thing?

I just came to say that poise was crutch for casuals and memers, and that is why there is huge vocal minority crying over "no poise" in DaS3.
In fact this new system is much more balanced and skill intensive, so let casual tears keep flowing.

You are pretty thin skinned fellow if shit games make you depressed. I mean, by default you already should be depressed by the state of the world, i imagine only a normalfag would get truly depressed by a video game.

Honestly DS2 has the least amount of input lag on pc. DS3 has poor optimization, and DS1 was just a failure of a port with shit controls.

I only beat Dark Souls + the DLC, have been meaning to touch the rest of the series but haven't really had the chance. Should I finish my copy of Bloodborne and then grab DS3?

None of those make a case for endlessly respawning enemies. Starter enemies die in two or three hits, even with starter stats and gear so even shitters can grind them, I imagine the average person would go to NG+ to continue playing and leveling since that's where they'd be able to do it in a way resembling quickly, and yes, NG+7 levels of health and stamina on top of much higher damage output make the game significantly easier.

Play DeS, BB and DaS3, in that order.
Avoid DaS2.

Game doesn't have its own input lag, you mouthbreathing retard.
Also what is this poor optimization you're speaking of? DaS3 had some crashes at launch that got fixed in a week or so, otherwise it always run perfectly.

dont listen to them, people hated 2 because it had worse level design but mostly because it was harder overall. 3 improved on the level design tremendously but has no replay value and the bosses are absolutely pathetic.

Why? Just play BB and avoid 3 because it's basically a shitty BB DLC in a DaS skin.

…where you trying to reply to me?

How such digits can possibly lie? They obviously do.
DaS3 is a direct upgrade over DaS1 and BB.

…
… I guess…
… ….

All of those make a case for throwing the shit you've been spewing back in your face. You're the one trying to say that the enemies despawn because it's some anti grinding measure that is implemented for the sake of preventing people from leveling to the point where they can just steamroll any boss that stands in their way. That's retarded when co-op is a much faster and more efficient alternative. Even if someone spent a great deal of time grinding, say three in game days, just endlessly grinding and upgrading their stats, they're still prone to death if they don't know how to properly dodge moves and attack during an enemy's down time.

Whatever, man. You think that despawning enemies is a good feature. I think it's shit. Clearly, neither one of us is going to change our minds on this. As I've said already, bonfire ascetics are fine, but the despawning enemies is pointless. If anything, despawning enemies makes the game easier for new players, because they don't need to grind to defeat them. Instead, they just clear a path to the boss by defeating them a shitload of times until the despawn. Your anti-grinding measure is now a concession for shit players.

Sometimes people write thing they know are wrong, in an attempt to get a response. We call this "bait".

That's exactly what
is.

Sometimes people write thing they know are wrong, in an attempt to get a response. We call this "bait".

filtered

I believe he has an issue with your misuse of the word 'upgrade'.

That's the problem with them. They're a fucking joke and not even a real Boss it's just a room full of skeleton soldiers.

Better, improved, refined gameplay mechanics are not "upgrade"?

Sometimes people write thing they know are wrong, in an attempt to get a response. We call this "bait".

NG+ is a much faster and more efficient alternative to the shit you're doing but that's clearly not stopping you. What's preventing other people from taking the retarded and slow route?

Objectively wrong.
Subjective and dependent on case-by-case basis. In this case, devs fucked up.

Now you're getting it. The fact that enemies despawn

Oh please, you can go in detail how DaS3 is not an improvement over DaS1 and BB.

Exactly. They're actively prevented from taking the retarded and slow route and are forced to git gud and progress. Even if they're total retards who can only get to the boss by despawning all the enemies, the boss will still bar their progress until they git gud.

Sure.
a)Lack of a philosophy and cohesive vision
b) Failure to integrate combat mechanics from DS2
c)Unnecessary weapon arts with extra animations
d)'Homage' to DS1 but can't step out of its shadow.
e)Reliant on existing lore and fanbase.
f)Lack of puzzles and traps.
g)No replay value - NG+ just adds more zeroes to soul drops and +1 rings.
h)Hybrid abomination of a combat system - team undecided between going for Das1 pacing or BB pacing.

So on and so forth.

In my opinion, they should have made the mechanic less of a slap in the face. The philosophy behind despawning enemies straight up crashes with these games' roots in the dungeon crawler genre. Maybe once they despawn, area should have filled with different enemies, few in number but very strong, as an indicator to the player that he could take the risk and keep grinding, or move on. It would also add challenge to the game, I think.

You can literally run to the boss room avoiding every enemy in every single one of these games.
What the fuck are you even talking about about?

No, it's garbage.

No. Your initial argument was
You just asked
If someone wants to grind, well they fucking can't. It's shit.
No, instead it just rewards persistence. It's fine to reward persistence, but the challenge should always be present to test the player's mettle. In this case, the challenge is just being slowly eroded over time. Are you really suggesting that DaSI would be better if enemies just stopped spawning? Clearly the designers disagreed with that notion, as their latest iterations have seen the return of this feature.

See, Satan gets it.

Go back and read.

Playing DS3 after being done running two character tru NG and NG+ in DS2 I have to say that, outsite one or two aspects, DS3 is a plain downgrade despite the appearances.

The biggest plus DS3 have over DS2 is level design. Not level placement but actual, inside the level design. Levels in DS3 looks like a proper go back to DS1 philosophy with unlockable shortcuts, larger areas and much less corridors than DS2. DS3 also sports much better graphics and visuals than DS2's unpolished mess. However the upsides ends here.

The best thing DS2 does over DS3 is the amount of paths you can take to do the levels in the order you want. DS3 simply tunnels you tru the whole game in a single level order, only branching thrice at the Cathedral of the Deep, Lothric Castle and the DLC and even then, the Cathedral is nessecairy to unlock Irrithyl and you can only do it 2 levels earlier than you need to have it accomplished while Lothric Castle isnt worth doing because you can only clear it once you got all the Lords down. In DS2, you can choose from two path at character birth, either the Forest of Fallen Giant or Heides' Tower of Flame, then depending of your choice it opens up to 5 more paths, No Man's warf, Huntsman Copse, Lost Bastille, The Pit and Shaded Woods. So you can be two levels deep in the game and visit 7 levels total to choose from. Its even better than in DS1, DS2's early game allow you to skip or postpone content you would be burnt out from overdoing. Two impacts this format have is that creating new character is much less tedious as you can just avoid repeating the same levels over and over and getting burnt out. The second is that you can get items in the order you want them, most notably magic vendors and boss souls.

Even tho level design in DS2's earlier areas is often inferior than the self looping Bloodborne-style levels of DS3, they're not terrible, outside one or two examples, most notably Aldia's Keep.

Late game DS2 funnels its level choices at Drangleic Castle until the Undead Crypt and it personally feels like the weakest point of the game. In order to advance you absolutely have to go tru these 3 specific levels in this specific order and there are no alternative incase you get sick of dying from Archdrake clubs under long range magic battery. Its maybe why I got sick of DS3 so quickly because ALL OF DS3 WORKS LIKE THOSE DS2 LEVELS. At least Bloodborne have a few branching paths to choose from with different rewards at the end, specifically the Nightmare Frontier, Forbidden Woods, Hemwick Charnel Lane, Unseen Village and even Cainhurst. In fact MOST of Bloodborne is less of a long ass line of levels you have to do in a specific order but about the whole fucking game opens up when you cleared Cathedral Ward. DS3 fucking feel like a list of chores before getting to the fun part. Each and every fucking time I try out a new build I have to go to the same fucking levels in the same fucking order every single fucking time.

But wait, there is more.
DS2 manages somehow to OPEN UP AGAIN END GAME, mostly with the help of the DLCs. Once the Undead Crypt is clear you can choose from either DLC from the 3 or Aldia's keep. DLCs in DS2 really are where FROMSOFT got their shit back in level design, all 3 locations feels and plays differently from one another and all of them are a joy to explore and find new ways to navigate them. The Giant Memories mostly feel like a chore but their short length compensate for that. Dark Souls 2 ends with a fucking 3 bosses rush if you wanted to and you're not a fucking shit. Sure the areas may lack in fluff but they managed to get a sorrowful atmosphere fitting the sorrowful tone of the game. Personally DS3's boss was too short and too easy but they pinned the visuals fitting of the ending of this series, even tho half the fucking game is fanservice to DS1 fanboys. The boss's gimmick is pretty neat but doing it both solo and in coop and the boss could have had twice the hp and it would have been an endurance fight closer to what DS1 or DS2 offered, assuming you're not a fag that use lifegems.

Overall, Dark Souls 2 is a much less polished product but offers more freedom to how you got about playing the game while Dark Souls 3 is more akin to a pretty railroad from start to end.

Dark Souls 2 is also worth playing in NG+ since it adds more encounters and enemies, making the old levels worth doing again simply because they're slightly different and much more challenging.

Smaller points

TL;DR
Dark Souls 2 is PC
Dark Souls 3 is MAC

wish I had my old caps but i changed pc since I last played the game

The fuck are you even talking about?
Yeah. that's the boss. The thing you can't run past. And before you say well the enemies should still be there because the player will come back to those ares, not necessarily. The designers brought back infinite respawns but they also kept teleporting between bonfires. Not much of a challenge when you can just teleport past it.

But why bother with heavy armor then ?

You can read, right?

Lolwut. Some nice buzzowrds here, that also mean jackshit.
Paired weapons are indeed not as flexible as stance system on paper, but in practice you would dual wield only certain synergising weapons anyway. This actually sounds like a cohesive vision.
If you couldn't effectively utilize something, it doesn't mean it's unnecessary. Following your logic I can call stance system from DS2 unnecessary too.
What? You mean reused assets? Never mind they actually upped polygon count, texture resolution and added shitton of details.
Only autists care about the lore. Ones cry that DS2 has nothing to do with DS1 and other that DS3 is too reliant on DS1. What the fuck it even matter lol.
That is bad thing how exactly?
And NG+ in DS1 adds even less. NG+ concept for DS2 is actually good, I can agree on it, but its execution is as terrible as DS2 itself.
Another set of buzzwords. Gombat is fast, precise and is the single best one of all fucking franchise. Adapt or get wrecked, casual scum.

It looks cool. It reduces just enough more damage to not get killed when clothfags do. Raping dexfags who bought into longsword meme is super fun too.

I like how you fixated on that and ignored the rest of the post

I think he means that a large majority of the characters are either retreads of series favorites (Andre, Siegmier, Patches) or heavily derivative of existing archetypes (the firekeeper is the maiden in black, the priestess and her "keeper" from Carim are throwbacks to Garl Vindland and Astraea as well as the mute firekeeper in DaSI and Lautrec). Not to mention that there really wasn't any new story to be told, just implications that could tie Lothric to Lordran. Contrast that with DaSII and DeS, which at least each held their own basic plot and lore that was mostly disconnected from the rest of the series.

I like how you neglected to go back and read the previous conversation. I'm not going to waste my time reiterating points I've already made.

k

But all souls games have the same copy pasted characters one way or the other.
Or rather they carry them through most of their franchises with minimal alterations.

Fundamental problem = buzzwords? Nice going, man.
Agree to disagree. Any attempt to argue this point will devolve to anecdotes.
Then why were they mostly useless?
Now that's 'remaster' tier shit. Is that your argument? I could take it to the fucking bank.
Complements environmental hazards and level design. You going to tell me Sen's Fortress was NOT one of the most memorable levels of DS1?
And now we come to the crux of your argument GIT GUD, and I find it lacking. For your information, I've never EVER used a shield in DS outside of Dark Hand, and the way BB took the combat was my bread and butter.

understandable, seeing you're fucking terrible at it

Sure. I just agree with the other user when he said that maybe there's such a thing as being too derivative. I think the environments are the best aspect of DaSIII, in terms of fresh content. Maybe they didn't really add any new characters, but the environments, the enemies that inhabit them, and the bosses mostly shine. there are obvious exceptions, though, like Dragonslayer Armour which is just Ornstien 3.0, the Crystal Sage, all of the Black Knights and the Demon Ruins, Anor Londo, and Lothric Castle, which takes heavy influence from Boleataria and Undead Berg

There isn't any in DaS3.

If I remember right, damage is calculated by defense first and then absorption. Defense is simply based on your stats and the amount it reduces acts relative towards the AR that you are being hit with, where absorption is from your armor and is just that percent being reduced. Lets say that defense is giving us a 20% reduction to make things simple. Most characters with lower to lower mid tier armor will have about a 20% absorption. 100 - 20= 80, and then 20% taken of that from absorption leaves us with 64% of damage taken. The most I've gotten in absorption with the iron ring and heavier armor is about 36% or so. I don't know the max and it's only the first iron ring, but that's the most I've gotten to. Assuming our defense is the same, 36% of 80 is 28.8. Subtract that, and we get 51.2% of damage taken. About a 13% damage difference with a ring slot being used. Another thing to keep in mind is that the more defense reduces, the less your absorption will because that percent is taken from the leftovers of defense. At most, heavier armor will get you a swing lighter weapons, not that it'll matter if you're getting gangbanged from more than 1 person anyway. Besides, heavier armor is actually better against bigger weapon ARs because defense acts like a percentage threshold that is relative to what you're hit with. The most damage reduction against light weapons comes from defense first. It's funny that heavy armor was shittier in 3, because in 2 you could actually make a tank build and be able to see a decent difference.

DS1 is still the best of the lot but it still has its problems. I'd love From to go back one last time and do it right this time, from start to finish. DS1 is fantastic until you beat O&S and then the decline starts.

Can you expand on a) and d)?

Sorry, but I'm going to disagree with the people who claim that Dark Souls 2's problems are that it was made by a B Team. If that were the case, it'd be anomalous for Dark Souls 2.5, Dark Souls 3 and Bloodborne to all have similar enemy placements for that "difficulty through unfairness" idea.
Dark Souls and Demon's Souls have slower gameplay because of hardware concerns that were an issue at the time, the PS3 was already considered old when DeS came out, and then it was near the lifespan limit of the PS3/360 when DaS came out. Sony and Microsoft were teasing new consoles. Then Sony made a deal for a first-party title. At the time Miyazaki had been reading old vampire stories, so he decided he wanted to make something like Transylvania from Bram Stoker's Dracula. He decided that only the PS4 was truly capable of bringing such a setting to life, so he started working on Bloodborne. Thus the title is about Vampires, but in the end, the game itself is not really.
During this time Dark Souls II came out and was panned and the B Team crap began, but the thing is, they finished Bloodborne and then everyone started working on Scholar of the First Sin edition to update it for the new consoles and to change how the game plays.
EVERYONE worked on that one. They tailored the game together to have a different layout and encounter system for the enemies, making everything that people describe as even more intense and worse. And then once again, all of FromSoftware including Miyazaki who people tend to hail as a design genius worked on Dark Souls III. Which a lot of people say nasty shit about, once again criticizing the game for its enemy placements with the idea of quantity over quality, super aggressive enemies.
This is inconsistent with the idea that FromSoftware's "B Team" did something wrong with Dark Souls 2. While the boss design is seen as inferior for varying reasons, the design is still despised. Now that said, the world design was definitely poorly thought out, something that they never decided to address or change. You still go up an elevator into the sky to a kingdom full of an ocean of lava .. However, this is kind of justifiable in the FromSoftware universe(s) in a way, because we know from almost all of their games that time is not a constant. Time is twisted, and it's entangled. When the player dies it results in time being rewound, when the player uses a bonfire, it results in time being rewound. The only fixed points are the player's level of power and the souls of the bosses themselves. So it could be seen that when the player enters the harvest valley that it could be at one point in time just after Mytha herself was slew (to be reborn later as a Medusa), and then far into the future the old iron king's kingdom is engulfed in an ocean of lava from a series of volcanoes.
It doesn't make it any better that the Old Iron Kingdom is an ocean of lava above a clear sky in the harvest valley, or that the Sky Cage hangs (from nothing) over a dozen of the game's zones which are all perfectly visible, yet can be seen nowhere else in the game. Or that the Dragon Aerie would need to cast a gigantic shadow over all of the areas down below (including the Forest of the Lost Giants) in order to be where it is.
So yeah, B Team had its issues, but if one of the criticisms of Dark Souls II is that it makes it difficult by unfair enemy placement, then you can't ignore the fact that DS2.5/BB/DS3 all also have said "unfair enemy placement" as a norm. Dark Souls 2 is so different from earlier FromSoftware games not necessarily because "m-muh B Team" but because Demon's Souls and Dark Souls were created for the 7th generation consoles and there was concerns about console FPS limitations.
Also Demon's Souls' zones were even more linear than Dark Souls 2's world design, not only did you need to teleport, you could only teleport from one location to all the others, but not a single one of Demon's Souls zones intersect. So if linear world design is also the issue, then Demon's Souls which always gets hailed a master piece would therefore be an inferior game. Which it isn't. Dark Souls II is not a bad game, but it did have questionable decisions in its creation, which were then played out again with the rest of the company involved.

The fact you couldn't slap on a good heavy suit and just walk through many attacks was also pretty disappointing. It was just light roll all day. Like everyone has said so far, it was like playing zelda/fable etc, where the combat is wait for enemy attack, dodge once for each attack, swing once or twice. The DLC also added way too many phantoms into the game. Sometimes I found myself going in against a boss that I could 1v1 with 2 phantoms backing me. What am I supposed to do? Ignore the thing that makes the game easier on my first run? I also got hopelessly lost more than once thanks to the shrine that teleports you to the miracles chick being in a place I forgot about and the frozen furnace shrine teleporting me away from the castle. The entire time I played the game I was clueless as to what I was supposed to be doing in a roleplay sense. Wasn't my character trying to fix their memory? It ended up having nothing to do with great souls and the king (until the DLC alternate ending).

I can't think of any points in the game where I felt positioning was unfair besides the four wolves in Upper Cathedral Ward and possibly the two pigs in Mergo's Loft, pretty much any other situation with mobbed enemies you can beat by luring individuals away with pebbles or throwing knives. The game is ok, but seemed to lack many "Woah" moments (though this is potentially due to having played the other games) and seems easier due to the rally system, the gun parrying being easier than shield parrying, and the player just generally dealing a shitload of damage.

Try Shield.
No really, all of the Dark Souls games are designed for a shield. If you have an issue with Dark Souls's enemies or enemy placements, try equipping a shield and see how suddenly everything changes. A great example is the old iron king and the Gyrm Greatshield. 100% physical and fire resist, if you use that shield, OIK can't hurt you. At all. Dark Souls 2 has a shield for every situation. They realized that was a fuck up and didn't give you 100% resist shields in Dark Souls 3, except the typical 100% physical resist shields.

This nigga gets it. If you don't have your shield up when going to a new place, you're doing it wrong.
At least on the first playthrough.

There's also the factor that the player exhibits the traits of a Vampire, when wounded if you deal a lot of damage quickly you can recover all of the lost damage. But as I said, they decided to drop almost every other aspect of the Vampire motif other than the world design.

Being able to recover your HP by doing damage in rapid succession on a per-hit basis isn't in any other FromSoftware game unless you count the specific lifesteal weapons such as the Butcher Knife, but in BB it's every weapon that can do it. In DS3 they put it on the Butcher Knife as always, but they also thought about putting it on a ring where it would act like BB, but in the end instead they gave you a ring that requires a perfect consistent combo in a short frame of time that only actually procs if you're hitting entire crowds of enemies.

Yes? Summoning trivialises 99% of bosses.

Dude what, the greatsword is a great weapon.

Why?

Make harder bosses/don't put multiple summons near a boss

If he was trying to poise trough shit like it's Dark Souls 1 it's no surprise he got his shit pushed in.

DS2 is so much more fun as a sorcerer/hexer it's ridiculous. Went from slog and pound to tactical sniping, Unloading magic on some bosses feels like a Megaman FPS.

only people with bad taste will say this

That's exactly what the Souls series is, the world is ending. Dark Souls 3 is the literal end of the world withthe player watching the sun finally go dark.

My dear sweet user, DS2 felt that way to a lot of people, lacking in decent lore or game feel. What it lacks in those, it makes up for in solid PVP, arenas for 1v1s, and new enemys/enemy placements in new game+ The game really feels like it comes into it's own on new game+ 4-5 imo, great fun with a few friends for jolly co-op

The way I've always felt about souls games, is the story, lore, and co-op drew me in, the PVP keeps me invested after. You'll get little of the former, but find that the latter has much more to offer.

Also, being able to wear jesters, turtle armor (old or new), and one specific ring to prevent back stabs is great when you need to counter back stab fishing, lag switching, or faggots from brazil that lag so hard, they might as well be cheating.

graphics were pretty shitty compared to even demon soul, they cut out most of the lighting effects

Of all the lame ass things to complain about, you pick the graphics, holy shit user, there are more important things, go play scholar if all you want is, "dem graphics."

People really like the DLC bosses, with huge hardons for the Fume Knight and Sir Alonne.

Personally, I think the Ivory King fight as a culmination of the Eleum Loyce zone is the best Dark Souls has ever been. I have yet to play DS3, though.

Wasn't that just in vanilla DS2 with framerate unlockers (gedosato)?

As already stated by many people, DS2 just feels that way for a lot of the folk, I also really liked DS1 to the point that I 100% it, so I wanted to try the second one, and after getting SotFS at a sale I gave it a shot and I just kept getting frustrated by it.

The game is just not the same, nor does it follow the same design choices that made DS1 so good to begin with. Not only are the levels just corridors upon corridors with some crammed spaces and small rooms connecting the corridors, but also the game lacks the balance in challenge, it was so enamored with the difficulty that instead of making it challenging yer fair, it's just "lel 2hard4u" in cheap ways.

An example from the very forest in your pic: after lighting up the dark tunnel with the torch, I entered an area that was just a room surrounded by tight corridors in the form of cliffsides with no more than 3 of the fucking turtle guys, and since it's one of the starting areas you have very shitty equipment, so you can imagine the fun of fighting 3 of those faggots at low level, at the same time in such a crammed place, and also a fucking NPC invasion in the same area. Is this hard? yes, is it fun and challenging? fuck no, it's just hard for the sake of being hard, cheaply stacked against you because "that's what the players wanted amirite xD". It doesn't stop there, many areas just keep going with that stupid ass design of too many enemies with little room to attack an maneuver, so you just end up playing in a very safe, extremely slow and boring style.

The worst part? Levels themselves are actually harder than the bosses because of their cheap design, it's such an infuriating let-down to get through a fucking slog of a level only to fight dumbass bosses that follow the same attacks on repeat who become hard only because suddenly you fight two or more of them at the same time. It's such a dissapointment.

DS3 is to the souls series, as the force awakens is to a new hope. It has subtle differences between the two, but is ultimately the same in a lot of ways.

Now back to DS2 vs DS3, they are kinda day and night, with DS2 being great for PVP, (move canceling is gay and shouldn't be a thing though) and not much else, with DS3 going back to it's roots. It's got great lore, NPCs (considering every 1 out of 2 NPCs in DS3 is a call back to the first game, some loved the references and new iterations of beloved characters, others felt it ham fisted and lazy) bosses, and enemy placement all fairly on point, but what would a carbon copy of DS1 be with out the notoriously bad network infrastructure. The PVP in DS3 can be a joke sometimes, with combat so focused on precise movement and strikes to be bound to such bad latency makes for a miserable time. Not to mention the invasion mechanics of DS3 are the worst of any souls-like game out there, worse than BB and the shitty bell summoners. If you want to invade in DS3, enjoy invading into a gank squad every time, the game prioritizes you to invade the games of people that have co-op partners in their worlds, you might win a few, you probably won't, most people will insta-rush you with 4 people and pack in your shit.

The TL:DR version of it is, DS2 little to no single player/co-op "soul," as opposed to DS3 which had single player/co-op "soul," but none to speak of in respect to PVP. (PVP being what keeps a player coming back after beating the game several times, giving the game longevity.)

You can also join the Company of Champions covenant (the rock in Majula). It makes all non-boss enemies always respawn upon death/bonfire use.

Even enemies that have stopped spawning will come back while you're in that covenant. Once you leave, they'll go back to their previous status.

The exception being black phantom NPC invaders, they only respawn up to 13 times.

Apply yourself

SOTFS was designed for people that had beaten DS2 6-7 times already, and co-opers it delivered new challenges in an old and familiar package, and I can understand why as your first go of it at the second game, it seems unfair. To me and my friends who played over 1k hours on the vanilla DS2, it was like a breath of fresh air, and way more fun to play co-op.

So I'd recommend grabbing some friends and going to town on SOTFS, you'll have a better time of it, and you don't have to go to that area right away, you can go to other places first if I remember right.

Right after you kill the last giant, you get a fragrant branch of yore in SOTFS, and you can use that to un-petrify the dumb ass bitch blocking the way to the shaded woods, so you can go that way, or you can farm a few souls, think it was like 13-17k, can't remember, it feels like alot at the beginning, it's not, don't sweet it, so farm those souls, go to the talking cat in majula, and by the cat ring so you can survive the fall down the hole in majula, that leads down to the gutter. SO you got all kinds of options m8, the one thing SOTFS did right with the single player, was open it up, you can go just about any which way you want at the start, akin to DS1, you don't have to go to hiede's tower of flame.

Honestly, DaS2 is probably my favorite in the series. Is it the most polished? No. Does it have the best level design or enemies? No. Does the game do a good job of motivating the player to slosh through hordes of enemies and bosses? Initially, no.

What Dark Souls 2 does have, is a much more refined mechanics system. Because combat pace is slowed down, and healing takes longer, each button press requires much more thought put into it. The game is more methodical because of it.

Now, Dark Souls 2 on release had a fairly vague and unengaging story, but with the DLC and with SotFS, I believe it to be one of the strongest in the series. Characters like Lucatiel, Alsanna, Vendrick, and the feud between Creighton and Pate are some of the most compelling in the series. They contribute to a world that has a striking and unique tone in comparison to the first game. Dark Souls 2 wasn't afraid to take risks as a sequel. In some ways this went terribly (as with soul memory), but in others it made for a great experience. The world starts bleak and hopeless; with promises of losing yourself to the curse, the melancholy of those around you, and the decay of the world you walk through. But as you progress, you bring those wanderers back to Majula and in a sense, create your own kingdom. It never reaches the point of being hopeful, plenty of NPCs do lose themselves to the curse. But at the very least it strives for a tone different than the complete lack of hope that existed in DeS and Das1.

And to go back to the topic of the DLC, the Crowns trilogy really was a step up from the base game in terms of level design and enemy encounters. People like to shit on the B team a lot, but they don't take into account DaS2's very troubled development. The Crowns trilogy (as well as the Old Hunters DLC from BB) highlight just how talented they can be. The worldspaces are gorgeous, the levels interesting, and the bosses (aside from the coop areas) are great. The Burnt Ivory King is probably my favorite boss in a Souls game just because of how unique of a fight it was.

So overall, DaS2 was and still is flawed, but it's ambition is evident. And while people shit on it for not being DaS 1.5, the game (or at leas the SotFS edition) is still a worthy addition to the franchise.

Those weren't B-team, especially not The Old Hunters

Prove it.

OVER THE LINE

Shit on my face.

Shields were generally a bad idea in DS2. And I played through the with them. You're better off dodging everything or you're going to get miniscule windows of opportunity for a single light attack against some bosses.

I can feel it already, that this is not going to be an opinion shared by most, but I liked soul memory. Even in DS1, I power level after a certain point, I can only new game+ so many times before I'm like fuck it, let's try and max 'em out. Killed kitty cats in the forest in DS1, and killed the giant lord with bonfire ascetics in DS2, and DS3 had a dupe glitch so that one doesn't count as much.

But with DS1 and 3, it goes of of soul level, 10- 10+ if I remember right, with a few exceptions or items, and BB and DS3 being able to use a password and co-op with any level, with the phantom being buffed or nerfed to the hosts level accordingly.

Now hear me out, in DS2, when I max out my character, I'm well into the +500 million soul area, with there being like 44 slots of soul memory, when you get to above 15 million, around lvl 250-300ish, you're in the final bracket, I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me. There were a few high levels in DS1 and 3, but most are cheaters, in DS2 there are lots of high levels, I'd rather not be cut off from invasions and the like just because I'm high level.

Let the hate commence

She's not fat and that armor is GOAT.

How are faith builds in DS3?

I've been wanting to do a paladin of sorts, hurling lightning, and dispensing justice with an oversized weapon.

I won't get the game for a while, but I'd like something to look forward to.

metal armor only gimps your roll if you have shit endurance, since we are talking about new players here apparently (you mention them in your dismissal of the wolf ring) they level end first because its the stat that lets you swing more so they can kill things because they dont understand scaling.
every run NEEDS the abyss ring, so you will see the big fucking glowing thing on your way from andres to the big door
yes thats a fucking problem, there is a reason people HATE ice levels and water levels and swamp levels and that because fucking around with mobility is a cardinal sin in game design
I dont understand, the first playthrough of 1 where I knew what i was doing I didnt invest in dex because I wanted to use big weapons for fun.
as far as PVE goes my first playthrough had no poise because I wanted the ring slot for the cloranthy ring so I could block better with my silver knights shield and have more thrusts of my silver knights spear, because I thought stamina was the most important stat in the game, I beat the game with 10 vit and no poise thanks to shields not being hot garbage.
block them nigga, although I will admit the capra demon is hell for me.
in 2 I have no reason to equip a shield and so far I have been using a staff and a sword.

interesting, maybe I am just bad and dont know the intricacies of the combat considering I havnt beaten the game yeat but I have a shitload of tokens of spite and I am basically good enough that white phantoms dont matter because i can just R1 them, but I cant beat the lvl 150 guys in the arena yet.

most people like to stop when their build is finished, soul memory FORCES them into your bracket, the bracket of the guy who didnt stop leveling.
if you want to crush people with an OP character just wait for reds in DS1 since they can invade any level higher then them.

Well, it no longer matters, they put out that ring that stops soul memory growth altogether. It says it works online, but it works offline too. So now the twinks can do what they will. Although the caveat is that to level your equipment you need souls, this is too easily sidestepped by faggots trading items to each other.

In Dark Souls III they fixed it by implementing a tier system, if you pick up or obtain an item of a certain upgrade level it increases your tier in the matchmaking (permanently). So if you want to keep only fighting other players of your own tier, then you literally can not upgrade your weapons or pick up upgraded weapons.

It's actually a fairly decent system. No longer can you walk around at SL13 with tier 10/5 weapons and expect to only fight newbies, the higher your weapon level goes (and also +5 max weapons count as double levels, so a +5 Fume Ultra Greatsword is a +10 Greatsword in the matchmaking system) the higher you'll be matched up with. These two matchmaking systems work irrespective of each other too, so there's no WL10 SL20 queue, it's all either SL+/- or WL+/-, and it does calculations for BOTH. You can be SL10 and get beat the fuck up by someone SL120 because you were walking around with a +10 weapon.

Dark Souls 3 did the best anti-twink.

You're full of shit.
Nito had some skeles because he was the fucking lord of the dead and necromancer.
Max and Erma are partners and fight together so you have two of them fighting with each other.

You don't have a leg to stand on nigger, your probably just the typical sonygger pissed that DaS exists and not DeS2

The only build in DS3 is a 40/40 quality build with a straight sword, anything else is gimping yourself. Faith is actually the worst of the worst though and no one uses it. This is just the base game though and i have no idea if the expansions did anything to fix this.

The agape ring solved the soul memory issue for people who want to keep to a soul level meta, I keep 2 spare characters besides my high level main, one 99 and one 150 for community event fight clubs, using said ring.

This

wew lad, almost as bad as katana users

B8 and parry, gg

Dont listen to the pvpfag, you can do your build just fine.

I assumed he meant pve. No idea what works in pvp as i played a mage so whenever i got invaded i just turned myself invisible or clipped through the level and played hide and seek king until they got fed up and left. This game was hilariously broken.

I can't stomach 2 for more than 5 minute because of the colors they used and how wildly different the animations are from 1 and 3. Fuck, even DeS was less shit looking.

People only recommend straight swords and the Carthus Curved Sword because the of the phantom range, the lack of stamina loss when attacking compared to other weapons, the attack speed vs damage was good, and it always got two hits due to poise not being a passive bar like it was in 1 if you hit the first time for a huge portion of the patch updates.

You poor boy, they really gutted magic in DS3, DS2 imo had the best magic, pyromancy was even viable in PVP, along with a few sorceries and hexes. DS3 has shit magic, barely viable for PVE, my pyromancer run ended with me leveling into strength and running a big axe, dragon's great axe I think. Mana flasks were also stupid af.

I like big weapons and parrying, even if I have to run a smaller sword or axe to b8 the parry and then switch to it. DS3 made it way too easy to parry again, it's on par with BB for easy parrys, with DS1 being a close second.

DS2 also had counter mechanics for parrying, for instance, great swords, great axes, great hammers, when 2 handed and used with their normal R1 swing, can't be parried, Certain R2's can, running R1 can, back step R1 can, or one handing the the weapon also allowed for a parry. Felt like interesting counter play, as opposed to in DS3, you can switch to a whip, or hope they are stupid and take a few spells to the face, parrying is king in DS3, too easy to do, to much reward, for so little a risk, and that goes for PVP and PVE.

They made it easy by making the ceastus have the parry window the first game had on top of a near instant animation, while seemingly extending startup the animations for the shields that are "designed for parrying".

Actually playing through the game as a pyro was the easiest run i've ever had in a souls game. All you need is that ring that makes walking silent, that ring that recovers magic on backstabs, and the invisibility spell. A single backstab recovered the full amount of a single cast of invisibility so i could walk through entire levels without being attacked by anything. Then when i got to a boss i just spammed great chaos fire orb or whatever the fuck it was called.

It feels like they spent a lot of time trying to prevent people from breaking the game and as a result they broke the game.

that comic, kek

So if the ceastus(fist weapons, right?) is anything like the painting guardians curved sword or the parry dagger, it's parry frames are right near the start of the animation. As opposed to the buckler or the target shield, both of which have more available parry frames in which you can successfully get a parry, but those frames are in a later part of the animation, so you have to start your parry sooner or later depending on what you're running. Buckler is 3rd most available parry frames, then target shield, and the parry dagger with the most, but once again, the parry dagger and target shield/buckler have different timings because of the part of the animation that the parry frames are in. You just have to get a feel for each one.

One of these things are not like the other~

Don't forget that Chaos Bed Vestiges still does damage even if you miss with the center orb. There's also the Crystal Soul Spear which does a fuckload of damage. If you add in the 12% and 20% damage rings with the right clutch ring doing 15%, you get an added 47% damage on top of whatever casting material adds to it.

I normally run sheildless, if I do, it's usually the grass crest on my back just so I have a reason to carry one which probably fucks over the timing a lot, but everyone in pvp carrying a blessed ceastus specifically for parrying in pvp and getting free hp regen makes it even less enjoyable.

is this implying that he wasn't hollow after all?
am I missing something?

Fair enough, at least you can still jump attack them, maybe in DS4 you can parry that too, then we can have no real counter to parrys. But yea, grass crest shield is probably not your best bet for parrying, but it can get the job done in a pinch, and who doesn't like the stamina regen? I mean the hp regen is nominal tbh on blessed items, especially since from decided DS3 was gonna be Sunny D chugging simulator

No, you aren't, the comic maker is. They don't know the fucking difference because they just see "LE EBIG DRAMATIC STORY" and ignore the whole thing about how having no ambitions goals or desires left will result you in going Hollow.

whoops, well one of those pics is unrelated, here's two to make up for it

I'd two-hand the weapon, because blocking and parrying is for casuals.

I thought you hardcore souls fans were good. This thread is one big joke. Thanks for confirming that you hate the game because you suck.

(You) Good job not reading the thread.

SotFS fixed my biggest gripe with DaS2:
Actually rewarding exploration with loot.

In vanilla, there are fucking shitloads of chests that carry nothing worthwhile, and yet they're still hidden in places that are hard enough to get to you'd expect something good (like all the hidden rare armor/weapons in 1). Instead, the majority of the interesting weapons/armor sets in vanilla DaS2 were fucking 0.01% drops from enemies that you CAN'T GRIND BECAUSE THEY STOP RESPAWNING. Grade A bullshit if you like collecting loot like me.

SotFS, on the other hand, actually put most of the bullshit grind loot in actual chests or on bodies hidden around the world (like DeS and DaS1 did), which both rewarded exploration, fostered more discussion (for people who don't go to the wikis for every little thing), and made it so you don't have to waste all your fucking time and ascetics to grind a boring enemy 1000 times to get the one piece of a set you want.

The only thing Dark Souls II has going for it to me is the PVP.
The pvp in Dark Souls III is just so…. pointless.

I did and it's full of the same tired complaints: soul memory, which doesn't break the game entirely, and multiple enemies and the mythical unfairness. You guys are a joke, playing elite but really being bad at video games.

The build and moveset variety in 3 just feels terrible after 2 did so well with that, and armor being basically useless doesn't help any.

I miss being able to mix and match all sorts of movesets in 2, that shit was fun.
Left hand artorias and right hand bone fist had the most fun, diverse moveset I've seen in a souls game to date, plus you could have other weapons.
PVP in 1, when equally matched skill-wise, was about trying to surprise and catch your enemy off-guard with varied uses of moves and timing. 2 brought that to a crazy level, with the amount of interesting situational moves you could bring into combat. 3 went back to 1's style of similar movesets, but left out most of the specialized moves for catching people out, meaning combat is boiled down to literally a game of timing (which is fun, but not enough).

It's not about difficulty, it's about variety in how you get bullied by the game.
When I get the shit kicked out of me in an interesting, unexpected way, or by a really interesting enemy, I love it.
When I need to kite 60 niggers across the map for 30 minutes, it's not that fun.

There is never a situation in which you have to deal with that many enemies unless you create it.

The only legit bullshit area is SOTFS Shrine of Amana, but even then you could argue it exists to test the versatility of your build (and your nerve and patience).

Can you even name cases in which the game is unfair?

You dont have to press enter twice after every sentence, faggot. Also your whole post is pure bullshit and I advice you to actually read the thread

I am on a phone so I'll format my posts to read them better faggot.

...

Most of drangleic castle went the "more enemies means more fun guys" route. The area with the doors that open when you kill a guy near it was kind of neat, but the elevator area sucked, the leadup to the mirror knight wasn't great unless you kited one goy at a time, the flamberge nigs jerking off in the rooms just before sentinels, etc.
There's plenty of situations where there's just a bunch of one guy ready to ambush. Ambushes are good and all, but not when they're literally every second encounter.
What happened to DaS1's style of having most enemies just wandering around a "patrol route" of sorts, with just a few guys positioned for ambushing/providing support to front line guys you fight?
3 brings back more patrols, especially in irithyll, but it also has the same "every second encounter with easy mooks force-aggros an ambush" thing.

Also this is one thing SotFS didn't fix at all. It removed some of the more annoying ambushes, but then added a bunch of really nonsensical ambushes in dumb places (fucking chariots in drangleic castle's chapel-like place, etc.).

I play the games for the PvE experience and the level design completely killed it for me. Transitions like Harvest Valley (in itself a very disappointing "token poison shithole" area) to Iron Keep and Aldia's to Dragonville.
Also way too many irrelevant characters and some tragically underdeveloped, like Licia and Vengarl.
That said, if we go by the time invested in it, it was my GOTY for that year. I loved the fact that I could leave a summon sign and be able to move 5 feet away from it and there's tons of things that were major improvements - menus were easier to navigate, fully functional left-hand move sets, easier to use two quivers, ascetic to respawn bosses, power stancing, poison was not only serviceable but good, stat respec etc. The fashion is also top notch.
All 3 DLCs are great. I love the level design in Eleum Loyce, how you're able to see most of map from vantage points and Fume Knight is easily in my top 3 favorite boss fights in the series. That said, I hated every damn challenge area; doesn't require any thought to cram a bunch of enemies in a corridor or make you fight two giant tigers that will fuck you from every angle.

Dataminers found hints for the second DaS3 DLC. Name's in Japanese and roughly translates to 'City of the Dead'. Londor? Hope so because it's arguably the most interesting plot element in the game alongside Sulyvahn and Aldrich's Age of Deep.

Sotfs forces you to be more resourceful and to have mastered the game combat mechanics. You need to be skilled at dealing with groups as much as dealing with individual enemies.

…and you're able to parry someone regardless of which way you're facing

Are you implying anyone died to the weird nonsensical ambushes? They're all either easy or avoidable, it's just that kiting guys for a long time isn't very fun.

I wouldn't say it's pointless, more so that it is different?? Right now, the pvp gravitated towards ganking. With the inclusion of practically limitless seed of giants, getting ganked is not fun. The 1v1's are fun and actually take skill but when 8/10 times you're getting ganked by 3 or 4 people at a time and they are using a seed of giants to get the enemies to fuck you up. You wanna get the enemies to help you kill the host and phantoms? Nope, fuck you. Enjoy your 3v1 and all the enemies in the world.

If they made the seed of giants harder to get, invasions would definitely be a lot more fun. Understandably, invasions are not supposed to be fair to the invader because it's dark souls, but having a 3v1 is already good enough to make it not fair. When you can no longer use the enemies to your advantage, I think that's when pvp is pointless.

Going into movesets, they added the sword arts which no one fucking uses. Have a faggot turtling, use the sword art to break his guard. It's not as good as 2's movesets, but it's a good change because if the game was the same as the last 3, it'd be boring and not worth the buy.

I think the one thing I still agree on is that the Dark Souls games are still go games compared to the shitpile of AAA games that have come out for the last 5 years. 2 isn't good on souls standards, but compared to garbage from EA or Ubisoft. It is good. That isn't saying much though. Anyone new to the series I tell them to play pic related in order.

good games compared**

Problem with sword arts is it takes too long to execute.

The problem is that a lot of them are completely useless outside of specific instances and are only there for padding.

Yes, a lot of them are there for padding, but it gives non-casters a reason to use their FP. It added a whole new mechanic to the game whereas in DeS-DkS2 the only reason a non-caster would use magic would be for buffs i.e second chance, cursed weapon, crystal magic wepaon. They were almost never used for attacks except in pyro builds but now "magic" can be used by anyone for direct attacks instead of indirect ones. I think it's a good idea with bad execution. They could have done a lot more with sword arts like maybe have a ring that shortens the wind up for attacks to make them more viable or have a stat that increases damage of sword art attacks and reduces FP consumption when leveled up.

Just like the rest of 2 and 3.

I am not implying anything, it's all people cry about DS2.

I'm gonna give a quick rundown of the history/a personal summary of the quality of each game

Miyazaki took over the game half-way through development, and turned it into the game that surprised the fuck out of everyone for the amount of effort and thought that went into it. It's easier compared to Dark Souls 1, and everything isn't as polished.

Pretty much just took DeS and made it better. Unfortunately, Namco rushed the development, resulting in the second half of the game being borderline unfinished (lost izalith, the bed of chaos, etc.)

Started out as a sequel to Dark Souls designed by Miyazaki like the last two games, but half-way through development he either left or was sent by execs to make Bloodborne. The new director royally fucked up everything Miyazaki had done, which is why you see hints of good ideas and wasted potential, enshrouded by an utter lack of understanding as to what made dark souls and demon's souls good. contrary to popular belief, it was made by the people who made DeS and DaS, just without Miyazaki.

This one was done entirely by Sony's in-house development studio, with Miyazaki as the lead designer (and some other folks from FromSoft, Could explain badness of DS2 through talent drain). It was an entirely different approach to gameplay than Dark Souls, where Dark Souls was slow and deliberate, Bloodborne was fast and twitchy like a traditional action game. Really good but kind of linear.

Because Dark Souls 2 was such a rollicking success, Namco decided to greenlight DS3 entirely without Miyazaki, and development started while Bloodborne was still being finished. Miyazaki took over as Director when he finished making Bloodborne, hated everything, and decided to scrap all of it and start over. This explains why it seems so rushed, and either that or executive meddling is why it relies so heavily on gameplay ripped straight out of Bloodborne.

tl;dr Dark Souls and Bloodborne are the only two games that actually had a full development time with Miyazaki as director, and of those two Bloodborne was the only one that was actually finished.

t. Dark Souls super-autist

Myazaki fags are a fucking meme at this point.

there is no A-team or B-team, FromSoft is a pretty small developer

Its far from the only thing people critize dark souls 2 for

DaS2 was a shit game and you have shit taste.

The only thing I find good about DkS2 is the UI and menus which are pretty much perfect.

It's more like someone took the worst parts of DeS and DkS and slammed them together while putting a guy who had no sense of geography in charge of designing the world.

I can do that too.

Being a sonygger fanboy of a developer of flukes is even worse.

I'm pretty sure Miyazaki at no point was involved with DS2, only as a supervisor at most.
I believe DS2 had two different directors though, similarly to what what happened with Devil May Cry 2 and Final Fantasy XV.

You said all everyone cried about in dark souls 2 were the enemy ambushes which is a lie. Of course you can also bring up arguments as to why you liked dark souls 2

Three directors, actually. First there was the guy that was director during the very first gameplay footage, then apparently that went tits up and they switched to Tanimura(?) and one other dude that worked on ACE before that co-directing trying to salvage shit. It's DMC2 all over again but except somehow the end product was a good game, just kinda disappointing by the standards set before it.

I guess I should also mention the entire reason the game was a thing, wasn't because Miyazaki wanted to make a sequel, he was actually against it at the time, but becuase FROM wanted to break their dependency from Sony's horribly outdated PhyreEngine, which was used as the base for pretty much every game they developed since launch of the 360/PS3. DaS2's engine is the base for both Bloodborne and DaS3's tech so it at least served some purpose in the end.

Yeah DS2 is shit, so is DS3 but its better than DS2 at least.
Bloodborne is really good though.

Thats a pretty big nose on (((Trusty Patches)))

PvE
DeS>BB>DaS>DaS3>DaS2
PvP
DaS2>DaS>DaS3>DeS>BB

Also, DaS3 wouldve been much better had they taken more from 2.

At the very least they could've retained power stance as an alternative to weapon arts since most of them varied from superfluous to outright more dangerous to the user than the enemies.

Just a reminder:

...

Where exactly?

I can't recall the location where you had to look up but IIRC looking up showed part of the no mans wharf. Searching more will update if I figure out where it was. It probably was patched by now.

it was at the lost bastille, the place you get to after fisherman's wharf. you arrive on a rocky beach beneath a giant cliff, then take an elevator up to the bastille itself. However, if you look up at the beach, you can see beneath the floor of the bastille above. It's really lazy.

When I started playing Dark Souls 2, I had high hopes for it. When I tried playing it, the game felt different very different from Dark Souls 1. You could no longer grind monsters as they respawned only ~5 times. The monster placement was just awful and you often got ganked by dozens of normal guys. The level layout wasn't to my liking. On top of everything else, the game has the audacity to throw unavoidable Red Phantoms at you and I couldn't beat the first phantom wizard because I couldn't get any decent gear because the normal enemies stopped respawning after a while. I only played it for a day or two and in the end I quit playing and uninstalled it.
Sure, Dark Souls 1 beat my ass to submission, but that game always game you a fair chance to try again, all the monsters were there, if you weren't good enough, you could farm for more souls and upgrade your gear instead.
Dark Souls 2 just felt somehow hollow (pun intended) and frustrating for me. I feel kind of bad for paying money for it, even if it was on sale.

Fast travel was the biggest mistake the series made. It worked in DS1 since it gave the mcguffin some use to the player and late game sections are so far apart that fast travel is necessary to get to each one quickly.

DS1's map fits so well because its based on the engine's streaming content and you can practically walk anywhere in the game. DS2 is nothing but deadends since it relies on fast travel back to Majula rather than being able to loop back to Majula like in DS1 with Firelink Shire.

Fast travel was a sidepower given to you when you had beaten the "half" of the game. It was given with a glorious cut scene. DS2 Just wasted it away in the beginning like a whore.

Isn't the warp in the first game limited to specific bonfires as well? There's still a lot of bonfires you can warp too, but I remember there being a limit to what you can go to rather than going to every bonfire 2 and 3 did. I liked how the levels were laid out in DeS, they were a lot better than the bland nothing that is 3.

DaS3 is even worse for this. Not only is fast travel given to you form the very beginning but every single bonfire can be visited immediately and, on top of that, there are fucking bonfires nearly every ten steps. Seriously, you kill High King Wolnir, get a bonfire, then step outside in to Ithryll and immediately get another bonfire. Then you cross the bridge and get another bonfire.
DaS2 may not be as good as 1, but it's still better than 3.

I'd argue Vordt is worse. You kill him and get a bonfire. Then you warp down to the Undead Settlement and get a bonfire. Then you walk through the gate and get a bonfire. Once you get further in the game, you fight Dancer and get another bonfire that's a nothing more than a flight of stairs away from Vordt's bonfire.

Don't forget that after dancer there's another bonfire about two rooms away after you climb the ladder

That's true, and then up the ladder and turn right and there's another bonfire.
Miyazaki's A-Team my ass…

I completely forgot about that one. 3 had a bad case of level designers not talking to each other.

I can't stop laughing at this picture.

...

it's by far the worst game in the souls series, and an average action rpg at best

Only thing remastered versions of those games would have is MAYBE 60fps, and increased resolution.

And while we are at it whats the deal with the 2 bonfires behind dragonslayer armor?

That is objectively wrong, and I don't mean that as an insult to DeS. The truth of the matter is, however, that every game improved on the PvE from DeS. Bosses in that game were pretty meh and basically the definition of dudes in armor.

As someone who played the games in order, Dark Souls 2 feels way more like a Demon Souls sequel than a Dark Souls game.

Started the game a week or two ago. You would have to be blind not to notice the wiggling tree. Same goes for watching out for those lizards pretending to be vines. Stuff like that and the details of impact marks and bloodstains clue in to trap areas in places like Sen's Fortress. As of now the only big thing that was hard to distinguish have been ladders that blend into the wood staffolding of Blighttown. At least via the Master Key shortcut.

Blightttown ladders always have a lit torch on top of them, dunno if they also have one at the base.

"git gud"

They start summer sooner and sooner every year.

don't hate the game, hate the moron

Soul memory would have been fine, IF it only counted souls that were used for 1 - leveling up 2 - upgrading weapons 3 - buying certain vendor items or other story based requirements

Then maybe add in like, 1-10% of the souls you get from killing other players in PVP is added to your total, but also 1-10% of the souls your enemy gets for killing you in pvp is subtracted from your soul memory

It was a fine system to add, just not in the bare bones state it was, it needed a lot of refinement

Explain Old Dragonslayer then.
Granted, he'd be piss easy if you'd played DaS1, but if you go into DaS2 without having fought Drake and Josh before, you would still get your ass handed to you.

This is why many of us make the point that DS3 has excellent level design but god awful world design. You can tell the levels were made seperately from the world so when they decided to stick it together like lego the world design flowed like shit.

Are there any Earthen Peak -> Iron Keep transitions in DS3?

Yes, though it's a bit of a mindfuck.

Catacombswhatever (With the giant skeleton boss) -> Icy City

I can't even fucking remember the names of the bosses and places like I can for DS1.

There is an intended one with the consumed kings garden into untended graves but im not sure what the reason for it was.

DS2 has for the most part awful level design and awful world design but I don't see why that's relevant to what I said about DS3. Point that argument to the user I replied to.

This is my main problem. Even in my first playtrough I could remenber all of the locations names, but in Dark Souls 2 they are more like levels and not really locations, it's really weird.

The bell tower, the bastile and the place where they imprison the first sinner or wathever is his name, it all feels like the same location, but it have different names.

Well, technically they are the same place.

It still amazes me that people struggle with O&S when all you have to do is circle backwards around the pillars and use them as barriers against their attacks. I can do these two without taking a single hit with this tactic.

You said levels felt disconnected when it came to bonfire placement. My question was pointed towards that possibly not being the only aspect in which they felt disconnected.

Bloodborne>Dark Souls 1>Dark Souls 3>>>>Trash>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Dark Souls 2

same here dude. I loved it.

DS2 is my favorite, come at me

In light of DS3, 2 is actually "not that bad".

The only area that does something similar to that elevator from Earthen Peak to Iron Keep is Untended Graves but that's intentional from a lore perspective. Untended Graves isn't even geographically incorrect to the rest of the world it's the pitch blackness of the sky compared to Lothric Castle that just doesn't make any sense. At least with Irrithyll you can put it down to Gwyndolin casting an illusion of the moon but that isn't the case with Untended Graves.

Same fucking autist spamming those greater than signs like a 12-year-old. Do you undestand that even one such sign already means that something is greater or less than something else? You fucking dingus.

But the pitch blackness makes sense, did you talk to the woman merchant in there?

From a lore perspecitve, not from it being next to Lothic Castle where the sky is lit up.