Dark Souls II

dude dsfix enables 60fps and other graphic accoutrements for dark souls 1.

Usually everyone just picks up the fire sword from the cave in the early area. Dunno about viable builds, enough to wield the sword and then everything else into health I guess.

The only problem i had with the 60fps thing in DaS was getting stuck in the bonfire animation sometimes and going downstairs looks weird but thats about it

it breaks certain parts of the game, mostly a few jumps and collisions like combustion.

You only get stuck at bonfires if you revert back to human form without waiting for the sitting animation to finish.

Yeah thats exactly what happened a few times, i usually dont bitch about FPS but the game is so much better at 60

Obtain Ring of Restoration. Whenever you drop below 40% health, hide and alt-tab. Shitpost on Holla Forums until health is restored. Continue forward. Repeat until game is completed.

95% of the problem is that you're retarded. Just be observant and make slower progress through the levels. Don't do any crazy character builds, consider STR or just using raw-infused weapons until you decide on which damage stat to pump.

Shit's pretty boring, though, especially towards the last half. Lot of bad and low-effort areas, and enemy design is worst in the series.

The benefit of having 60fps vastly outweighs the few pitfalls here and there.

Despite "muh b-team" complaints, game is serviceable. Just like all other Dark Souls games gitting gud is all about paying attention to your environment and taking things slow. Also enjoy weapon power stances and dual wielding - they were cut from DS3 which is a fucking shame.

So I am being punished for being better at DaS1? you basically agree with me for the rest, in the previous game I was able to not quite speed run but get a grasp of the levels, ambushes were a thing but usually my fault, there are those weird spider-like things in the pirate level that build up 50% bleed even if you block them for example, not to mention the whole "enemies on turn tables" and "no wind-up attacks for you" in certain enemies, I was able to re-learn parry and it is still quite unreliable.

nigger what are you on about? DaS2 is the best of the series.

and dont give me the B-BUT HITBOXES excuse, every souls game has shitted up hitboxes, not to mention Sotfs seems to have fixed a lot of them (except for Heide Tower big knights, those are still pretty fucked), and added new levels of challenge by changing the enemy placement all over.

people who say 2 is worse than 1 are stuck on a 4 year old shitty maymay and can't accept reality, same kind of people that still spout the sun meme. i used to be like that too until i played DaS 3, and then played 2 Sotfs and i realized team B were the heroes we fucking needed, miyazaki is a hack. i wont judge 3 until all of the DLC is out, but so far its the worst because its the shortest, poise is broken and it has several game-breaking performance problems because they kicked the draw distance and polygons into top gear

You are being punished acting like this is DS1 instead of accepting this is a new game with new rules.

It's worst of the three for this purpose, but it's still not a bad game. Has some flaws, partly rectified in SotfS, partly amplified(because miyazaki is a little shit) but not by much. Overall it's worth being bought on sale.

It does do way better in PvP, however, and so much so that despite 3 having a higher playercount you get way more action in 2 by a considerable amount both on the bridge and in each of the arenas.

They flee from fire. Turn the brightness down, you're supposed to be lighting the place up. Or use a pharos lockstone instead.

I kinda what to replay it and all but with DS 3 out, I'm gonna feel like jabroni if I start up 2

Like every game?

In DS1 and 2 it can but that shit was scrapped on 3.

...

Not in the 3 where armor seems to matter about as much as it did in Bloodborne
Especially with the state of poise "working as intended"

This is probably the best feature in DS2, I won't deny that, but it's not enough to save the game.

Bloodborne is one of my favourites and that has like 15 weapons, fuck off.

nigga did you even play the other games?

Perfect for shits that can't commit to a build.

And it's still a much worse game than the other ones. Fancy that.

While I don't agree 2 is the best of the series it definitely has a lot of nice features that I wish the other games had. I had fun with it.
DS3 is worst of the series imo.

More like "replay the entire fucking game if you want to try something new"
Which gets extremely fucking boring after you pass the 100 hour mark.

I won't say that 2 is the best, that is obviously 1.
Overall, my ranking goes:
DaS > DaS II == DeS > DaS III

Soul memory made it so PvP was a mess anyways, there was no reason to ever stop leveling and make a new character because of fucking soul memory.

Not gonna argue much except for the enemy placement logic which ranges from slightly questionable to outright fucking retarded(case in point, scholar Iron Keep)
First one is still much better.

Agape ring rectified this, you can pretty much stay in the same bracket forever with it in mind.

Was the agape ring DLC?
I only played DaS II at launch, put around 150 hours on it then never played it again(To put it in pespective, I've got 500 in DaS I, around 120 on DeS and 60 on DaS III)

kill yourself

bloodborne isn't even a souls game, same reason dark souls 3 is shit, they made bloodborne 2 and gave it a coat of darksouls color paint

armor cant be upgraded in 3, and it can't be upgraded in Demon Souls.

why would you not want to try out other builds? thats like saying the game has too much conten- OH WAIT, you did earlier, kill yourself 2: electric boogaloo

nah, you eat shit, DaS2 is objectively the best of the series, and you haven't disproven a single one of my valid points, only memed.

i disagree for the reasons i mentioned in my earlier post.

DaS 2 > DeS >= DaS 1 >>>>> BorneSouls 3

Gee, so that means I get ambushed every 2 minutes instead of 5?

Yeah, I found out later, still, kind of stupid with such a high bleed build-up.

Agape was added in a patch at some unspecified, bought off of Straid.
Before it happened the pvp was kind of an asspain but considering that brackets were 1-2kk souls inbetween it wasn't really painful. Plus arenas do not account for soul memory, which is a lesser-known fact for some reason.

what was wrong with the placement in Sotfs iron keep?

its actually one of the areas that has barely any change whatsoever. the difference is that they improved the Alonne Knights AI, they're not mentally retarded anymore.

Yeah, they haven't changed the placement but they did increase the range at which they engage you and this leads to you either cheesing everything with a bow or having to deal with up to four of these shits at the same time which is a gigantic pain in the ass unless you're an STR GA/GH/UGS user

How, DaS is an improvement over DeS in pretty much every single way(DeS ain't bad though)

My point was that if the game is bad the fact that "at least it has a lot of stuff in it!" doesn't make it better, in fact it makes it worse. Idiot.
I'd rather have 6 hours of pure fun and excellence than 150 hours of monotonous franchise milking.

i passed it just fine, original Iron Keep was far too easy because the enemies were retards, half the time they'd jump at lava, iron keep in sotfs was perfect, it was what it should have been in the first place, it really makes you consider where you will walk before you do so.

whats wrong about this? i get it some people want to play their RP fantasy with useless weaponry, but hey, the game gives you tools, you can't complain about a screw being a shit screw if you're trying to use a hammer to drive it in instead of the right tool.

But DaS 3 was less than 40 hours long.

Getting ambushed by seemingly teleporting enemies is not fun, is cheap, you remember the path to the first Bell of Awakening? is an ambush, and is fun, DaS2 ambush gimmick is not.

where exactly do you get invaded by teleporting enemies?

the fact you did not notice the enemies does not make them teleporting. should pay more attention.

That sentiment is about as dumb as people saying that Dark Souls 2 is totally just like Demon's Souls and the same people who said Dark Souls 3 is just like Demon's Souls. They're not.

Fuck that, it's like 20 hours long

...

i wish i had saved the CARPE DIEM comic because this is the perfect time to post it

who is retarded enough to say das2 was like demon souls? it was nothing alike.

The forest of giants first, I saw corpses but it was still easy to tell they were just enemies playing dead, (plus messages), but then there was a point where I kept spinning the camera around to see if there were enemies on my back, attacked an enemy in front of me and still kept being attacked from behind.

Then the pirate level, the very first area has two obvious traps, OK, killed the first, went for the archer, waited for the sneaky bastard on the planks and then killed the sword dude, there seem to be instances where enemies from a mile away don't move at first and then when I turn my back they are literally behind me, I know some enemies aggro after you kill some others, but the speed they come after you seems quite inconsistent if you decided to aggro them yourself.

A shitload of people with buyer's remorse when it came out, did that go down the memory hole? If you go back and check archives of Holla Forums threads around the time of release, or maybe watch some DaS2 videos made around the time of release, I'm sure you'll hear people make the comparison.

certainly not here. The game was shat on since its birth.

Just look at some posters here who praise the game and of course call people like me retarded for not playing by the new rules and all that despite me doing an effort to comprehend some of them while pointing out differences between challenging and cheap.

Where were you all this time? It was certainly called shit the moment it was released - hell, even before that during the beta.

that's it? the forest has a guy in the tower who climbs down when you approach the tree.
no man's wharf has guys crouching in the water pools that get up when you get close (but this time there is more guys than in the base game because Sotfs).

i remember everyone complaining that their weapons didn't last forever, and i thought to myself "oh, durability means something now"
in DaS 3 for example, weapon durability is practically something they forgot to remove, its a useless waste of screen space, your weapon will never break before the next bonfire, even if you purposefully hit every wall in the area to check for secret ones.

used to shit on it too, it was the cool meme at the time, but after replaying the series and specially Sotfs i can attest its definitely a better game.

i kinda wish FROM would add a Phalanx-like boss in the DLC of 3, maybe a little bit harder, they've made references to the storm meme gimick boss from des, so why wouldn't they phalanx or just go full assholes and make FLAMEFUCKER 2.0, to this day i still hate that boss and his EXPLODING KNEES FISTS

i'm not calling you retarded friend, just saying that you shouldn't go into SOTFS expecting to rush through because you played the original 2, by the time you reach the last giant, you already notice the enemies are placed different and have more range of view, so anything after that you should move through with extreme precaution as if you were playing a new souls game, you know the map, but you don't know where you will be attacked from, and thats the fun of souls games.

ie: the soldier guy with the halberd that is sleeping next to the room where you first meet Melentia the hag this time actually wakes up, if you run for the door he'll get you, there is an enemy in the room above it that wakes up and drops down if he hears fighting inside the room that has melentia.

Bloodborne's Abhorrent Beast is Flame Lurker 2.0 so it would be pointless to do a 3.0 version.

As for people saying DS3 is like DeS, I was one of those, but I only said that DS3 has more in common with DeS than Bloodborne. The faster pace for a Dark Souls game is more in line with DeS, the upgrade paths are more matching DeS, the lack of armor upgrading (which is great because every piece of armor is viable now) is more in line with DeS and the DeS refferences are much stronger in this game than others before it.

And you're telling others to git gud.

Champion Gundyr is probably the hardest DaS 3 boss.
That ain't saying much though, most of them are piss easy unless you're trying to use slow weapons, since the game is not designed for you to use anything heavier than a straight sword.

You goddamn retards never learn. Trying to teach people to vote with their money is the dark souls of real life

you couldn't roll 7 times at the beginning of the game in DeS

The good about Souls 2

The bad about Souls 2

Agreed?

I pirated it so I don't know anything about multiplayer

Also I haven't played DaS3 yet, should I go for it or wait for the inevitable DLC edition and then pirate it?

Wait.Dark Souls 3 is worse than Dark Souls 2, at least now.
It also has lots of things that you listed as bad in your DaS2 list.

The three the bother me the most are shitty bosses, heavy tracking and needing to go to majula to level up. If DAS3 doesn't have that then I'm game for it.

I just started it and so far its giving me the exact same vibes as dark souls 2. Just wait for a scholar of the good goy edition to pirate.

Do it, but get cheat engine and the poise fix. Makes the game mildly easier, but worth it just for the overall experience.

I think the problem with the enemy placement in this game is best presented in the Undead Crypt when you're on the way Velstadt.
The hallway filled with Royal Guards and if you mess up even dark spirits is the epiphany of bad design.
Removing invincibility in animations doesn't help either.
I think this even was the point at which I decided to stop playing the game.

Phalanx was already re-used in the DLC of Dark Souls and the fight with Rom in Bloodborne is pretty similar to Phalanx also, so I doubt it. Or maybe that makes it more likely, DaS3 doesn't have a lot of self-awareness or subtlety when it comes to reusing content.

"Reference"? They put in a sword called the Storm Ruler, with a special attack called the Storm King, which is picked up mid-fight in a boss room, which is meant to be used for that specific boss. That's not a reference, that's blatantly reusing the same content.

It doesn't even make sense, the Storm Ruler was put in DeS because there was no way for pure melee builds to fight that boss, you could totally fight Yhorm without the Storm Ruler. It shouldn't be any different than Tower Knight, Iron Golem, or the Last Giant.

I'd just skip it

Most bosses in DaS3 are kinda shit, there are like 3-4 good ones and they're all giant humanoids.
Heavy tracking is also in but mostly for bosses now, specially annoying when they use thrust attacks that just home furiously onto you.
You also need to return to the majula-like hub every time you want to level up too.

You mean better, since now more than one single playstyle is viable.

And even if you are super fucking carefull and kill the undead guy ringing the bell a second one spawns from the fucking ground later on. There is no way to know he is there, there is no corpse or anything.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that second undead. The worst thing is if you kill one of them but accidentally hit the bell yourself and get fucked in the ass by all the ghosts.

The rolling frames were key on skillful play and certainly stupid to just tie them to a stat instead of leaving them on your equipment load, same goes for jumping distance and item usage speed, it doesn't even make sense.

I can see what FromSoft wanted to do. They wanted to add more depth but fail to understand (and still do on some front) what needs to be done. In the end they broke something that didn't need fixing.

That's the perfect explanation of why DaS2 and 3 are both worse than DaS

The DLC was shit too. I don't know why people praise them. Gangbang central is not what Souls is about, the games are not really made for large group encounters.

When it comes to poise then yeah, however DS3 melee is an improvement over DS1. Magic is fucked this time as it's more supplementary than ever.

Is DaS3 really that bad compared to the first? does it even run at 60FPS on PC without any 3rd party addons?

Precisely, or at least that's my biggest complaint on DaS2, I could pretty much adapt to the other stuff, but that one just cripples my experience and forces me to go way slower than I am comfortable with.

What multiplayer?

oh, unlike 1 that throws 3 fucking asylum demons at you with different names.
what?
useless stat, you're free to not give any points here, null point.
like in des, bloodborne, and das 3? why is this bad?
name a boss that isnt big dude in armor in other souls that isn't shit
DLCs were a good challenge, Lud & Zant are borderline impossible, hardest thing i've ever had to do in any souls game.
aren't they always too strong? the point of tower shields is that you put in high STR and DEX to be able to use them and get 100% physical absorption and 70%-90% absorption on everything else, thats the point of Havels Shield (and Gyrm G.shield)
disagree, its just as good, specially if you take into account the DLC areas
if i gotta put 50 points in STR to use a weapon then you bet your ass it should do high damage
meme
hot opinion, not objective critique
nashandra is pretty hard if you don't have the blessed crown
yeah, aldia is a fag, only point in the list i agree with.

i r8 your r8ing Nostalgiafag/10

Not the guy you're arguing with, but I feel I'm the only one that liked the Bed of Bullshit.

How.

epin

I liked the change of pace.

Turn-Table Turtles come to mind, they even have a "no backstabing" move which makes the tracking kind of pointless.

As for level design, DaS1 at least blended them together, unless you think an elevator to the sky which arrives onto a lava world is good design.

The only bad boss I can think of in DaS1, at least from a gameplay perspective because it takes the pacing to a halt regardless of your playstyle.

wait what? i played that, i don't remember phalanx on it, just doublechecking, we're talking about the big slime that is covered in shields and spears correct?

B-BUT THE BOSS DOESN'T FLY!

wonder if Old Hero will make a comeback, an xbox huge guy with infinite stamina capable of raping your ass who reacts to sound instead of sight, which you have to approach very slowly, now that was original and well thought of.

But Old Hero was piss easy.
Possibly one of the easiest fights in DeS.

okay, you win this time

You have to admit it was very disjointed thanks to the early fast travel, in the first game part of the strategy was finding the shortcuts to make your backtracking easier.

They had a stats page for deaths and a vast majority of deaths wasn't because of enemies, but because of falls.

Level and world design aside, it's not as bad as other 2014 games.

Also only souls with twinblades.

The levels as a whole didn't feel remotely connected. You reach No Man's Wharf by going down from Heide's Tower, which is already at sea level. You DESCEND into the Wharf, which places the level based around a shipyard somewhere below sea level.

Plus, besides the areas reached from Majula like Forest of Fallen Giants, Heide's Tower, and the Grave of Saints/Gutter, I couldn't tell you where a single area is relative to any other one, because once you're out of sight of Majula the designers stopped giving a shit. The Earthen Peak/Iron Keep nonsense is the perfect example of that. Where the fuck is Iron Keep geographically? I have no fucking idea because the only way to get there is to basically teleport from the top of a tower from which you can't see it anywhere on the horizon.

I'd count the Asylum demon clones in there.

There was a Phalanx-type enemy in the Painted World. Not a boss though.

b-but time and space is convoluted!

:^)

painted world isn't DLC m8

In DSFix you can press backspace to switch between 30fps and 60fps. That's what I do whenever I do the level skips.

BTW, why did they get rid of sliding down ladders?

The Asylum Demons weren't even that prominent, since the last one appeared in Demon Ruins alongside Capra and Taurus I consider them just mini-bosses.

They didn't. You have to hold down and hold the sprint button.

Oh shit son, you just hold the button. If you press it you jump down.

Had one death to realize.

lmao

I know the game doesn't hold your hand but sometimes I think this is stupid, why changing then? at least I can remap jump to B, I know a lot of people don't like it but I do, can I do it on DaS3?

DSIII is a lot like Bloodborne, in that it is quite faster and there are quite a lot of mob encounters. It also is incredibly linear, giving you no real room to do what you want. Build variety is also fucked. I've heard mages and faith builds get a big fuck you whereas dex characters sweep up, at least in PvE.

I dont think you can remap the jump button in DaS3

In both PvE and PvP non-dex is unfun and way weaker than dex.

Yeas you can change the jump in DS3. FormSoft fucked up with Bloodborne though as you can't change it there. That is the game that would have benefited with it being on L3 the most.

You can. One of the first things I do because jumping with L3 is retarded as fuck.

What the fuck, I tried to change it but couldnt find it. I must have had a stroke while doing it

Oh shit you're right, it wasn't

Bloodborne is in no way linear

The Asylum Demon himself is good for what he is. Fighting him the same way he appears at first later in the game would be shit (which is why Stray Demon and the Firesage are garbage) but the first one's okay. Bed of Chaos is so badly designed From made a public apology for it. Capra Demon is the same kind of poorly-designed cheap difficulty that's rampant in the second game, but overall it's not that bad. Gaping Dragon's not that bad, but he is a huge letdown from his intro cutscene. Those are the only examples of lower quality bosses in the game though.

In Demon's Souls alone you have Phalanx, Armor Spider, Flamelurker, Maneaters, Old Monk, Storm King, and Astraea/Garl Vinland.
DaS1 has the first Asylum Demon encounter, Taurus Demon, Bell Gargoyles, Quelaag, Gwyndolin, Nito, fucking Sif - not to mention the DLC, every boss in which is better than anything in the base game, and 3/4 are non-humanoid. Kalameet and Manus are two of the best fights in the entire series As much of it as I've played, anyway. Beat DeS and DaS1, just got all the Great Souls in DaS2.

I didn't say it was, I said the combat has a lot of mob encounters, like Bloodborne. DSIII offers you two paths; the default way and the early Dancer way, that only takes you to the rest of Lothric early on.

C'mon now.

I mistakenly thought the next two sentences were part of the same comparison, sorry

...

It was shit.
You just run through the tox area/the left of the arena, beat a npc character with a slow ass weapon then astrae suicides.

The point isn't just "a big dude in armor" or a humanoid enemy with a giant weapon, which I think is a phrase a lot of people are borrowing from Matt's DaS2 critique, it's that they're all so damn similar and have essentially the same moveset. Other humanoid bosses in the previous games, like Penetrator, Allant, Tower Knight, Ornstein and Smough, or Artorias are completely different to each other.

That's OK user.

I enjoyed them. Storm King wasn't hard or particularly challenging, but I'd still say it's one of my favorite boss fights in video games. It's so visually incredible and it's so fucking satisfying tearing down each of the flying fuckers that have been harassing you in all the previous stages with a sword that rips open the sky. Astraea and Garl are good for similar reasons. Not particularly challenging, but it's an emotional and satisfying encounter, and an interesting twist on the boss formula. Even in Demon's Souls they were already experimenting with the boss fight template, and in DaS2 they abuse it to all hell. You're right, I actually don't know why I included Armor Spider. I think I just included it because it was a non-humanoid boss.

I'll grant that some of the items in my list are subjective, but there's no fucking way all of them are. I stand by Kalameet and Manus being objectively great boss fights. Compare the ones Iisted with the non-humanoids in DaS2:
-Belfry Gargoyles are blatantly ripped from the first game (which was already a pretty blatant Maneater clone), but made substantially worse because, like everything in 2, the devs decided the correct way to make something challenging is to add more of it.
-Executioner's Chariot is boring and broken if you decide to chill out in an alcove and use magic, but if you decide to tackle it the way it was intended it's frustrating and feels ridiculously unfair. Points for an interesting boss concept though. With some tweaking it could have been great.
-Covetous Demon was so fucking boring. Literally just attack ass and win.
-Baneful Queen Mytha is broken if you don't burn the windmill (which is so poorly indicated as even being an option that I'm shocked anyone realized it was possible), but without the poison she's a total pushover.
-Old Iron King is easy once you learn his tells, and is also probably the least inspired video game boss ever made. Iron Keep as a whole is like a Mario level with a Doom boss at the end.
-Najka's pretty good though, especially if you fight with Tark. Pretty fun fight.
-Royal Rat Authority = Sif + swarms of enemies + toxic - the interesting moveset provided by the sword. It's shit.
-The Duke's Dear Freja has inexplicable spider lasers, massive hitboxes, tiny areas in which to do damage, and swarms you with the same spider you've been getting swarmed with the entire preceding level.
-Royal Rat Vanguard is at the end of a level whose enemies are nothing but rats, and is a "boss fight" composed of nothing but the exact same rats. It's shit.
-The Rotten's an okay fight, but so was the Dirty Colossus when they did it in Demon's Souls. Even that wasn't anything special to begin with, AND it required more though put into it what with the breaking of his wooden parts.

All the rest of the bosses are either dudes in armor or I just haven't seen them yet because I haven't finished the game. But so far the bosses leave a hell of a lot to be desired. Pursuer was fun though.

It's also Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation review where he talks about every boss in DaS2 being some variation on "A dude in armor". It's become such a widely-spread meme because it's true. The vast majority of the bosses in 2 are some variant of a large humanoid with a large weapon and possibly some large armor, and a lot of them have really similar movesets. Visually most of them would be really interesting on their own, but fighting all of them back-to-back in the same game makes it really obvious that there's a theme and it gets old fast.

I'm not saying it's inaccurate at all, but it also seems like it's led to the assumption that either a) every large armored humanoid boss in the series is bad, or b) the large armored humanoid bosses in DaS2 are alright because those bosses are in the other games too.

Not like Yahtzee knows shit about the games anyway, he acted like the mana bar in DaS3 was a new addition for the series.

Which is even funnier considering he threw away Demon's Souls about ten minutes into 1-2, saying it was a shit game and that he didn't want to bang his head against a wall for hours, and is now gaga about Dark Souls and raves about loving to bang his head against a wall for hours.

I agree, lots of humanoid enemies isn't inherently bad as long as they don't feel like they're just being reused and there's a clear feeling of variety. The problem is that in Dark Souls 2, there isn't.

is the game worth playing for the single player only? I am obviously gonna pirate.

Since you obviously need Holla Forums to help you make simple decisions I suggest you stop being a fag.

What? The entire game is single player.

I mean no pvp/coop/invading etc

no bully

Despite the amount of shit it gets, and the amount I've personally shat on it in this thread, it's a good game. The problem is that Demon's and Dark Souls were masterpieces. They were FLAWED masterpieces, before anyone gets too triggered, but if you ask me, masterpieces nonetheless. The problem is, after those two, Dark Souls 2 being "just" a good game is an enormous letdown. If you've never played another Souls game, you'll love it. I find it's usually best to start on the worst of a good serious so you only have better stuff to grow into. If you played Dark or Demon's Souls first you'll still enjoy yourself, but you'll be constantly noticing things that were done better in the first games, or things that just could have been done better overall.

The biggest offender of them is the same movesets they share. If all of them were vastly different from one another with movesets Maria tier level they would be a blast to fight.

Yeah. I haven't played 3 yet, but I've seen footage of the Vordt fight. Strictly speaking, he's just another dude in armor, but he's massive, crawls around on all fours, and looks all bestial and wild. That's interesting. Not like the Ruin Sentinels, where visually they look lanky and kind of eerie, but they're just three tall dudes with a couple broad sweeping attacks.

Is there a reason enemies stop respawning in DaS2? is that supposed to be a good thing? does it happen in DaS3? I certainly complain at the cheapness of the enemies but looks like it doesn't even let you grind for souls.

Joining the Company of Champions circumvents it, causes enemies to spawn indefinately. Handy if you want to farm certain rare armor.

i'll be damned, i didn't know that

It works in SotfS on PS4. I don't remember it being a feature in vanilla DS2.

Can confirm that it works in SotFS on PC

guys, does anyone know whats up with the bright blue spot in the abyss of the untended graves?

Post pics.

fuck consoles. I have a 300+ hour character on DaSII on PS3 and I only just now learned that you cannot archive your save file. This is a surprise to me because it's possible to back up save files from other games, just not this one for some reason. It probably has something to do with save editing or uploading mule saves or whatever. Still, it pisses me off because I have every single item in the game and I just want to be able to archive my save on my desktop so that I won't be fucked if my PS3's hard drive gives out or something.

It's pretty obvious since you think Vordt is anything but a shit fight.

I still think that 2 is the worst in the series I haven't played 3, but I won't argue against the stuff you've typed up because it's the first time I've ever seen someone say that Dark Souls 2 isn't garbage while actually trying to explain why and I genuinely appreciate the effort.

All the same, can this "disliking Dark Souls 2 is a meme" nonsense just stop already? Every single time someone says DaS2's not as bad as everyone thinks, they always without fail descirbe criticism of the game as being "just a meme" in one way or another.

will in a bit, after my little brothers done hogging the desktop

Is he that bad? I have no idea how good a fight it is, my point was just that they found a way to make "A dude in armor" who doesn't just stand straight up and make big sweeping attacks down at the people on his heels. It's a dude in armor, but the fight looks nothing like anything that appears in 2. Hell, even the Pursuer was a more interesting fight because he hovered above the ground and slid all over the place. If he had been standing on the ground instead he would have been boring as shit. Just that small addition changed up the encounter significantly enough to make it memorable.

Is it not simply a meme? People tend to latch onto opinions that are shouted at them by influential figures in their lives. On the internet, this happens when [notable_youtube_personality] says something about the game, especially before anyone else has a chance to get their hands on it and draw their own conclusions. It's not a meme when someone says "DaSII was disappointing" and then a well thought out argument that outlines why is presented. It is a meme when dipshits spew verbal diarrhea like "xD DANK SWOLES DOUBLE LE WURST SOULS GAEM". More often than not, you come across the latter than the former.

Eh, I don't know. I went into DaS2 having heard pretty much nothing but bad things, but figured it couldn't possibly be that bad. I played through Heide's Tower and thought it was fucking great, thought Forest of Giants was kinda generic but with some really cool bits, and thought the Lost Bastille was fucking incredible I still think the level design in that area rivals the Painted World in quality and tight design. The game made a fantastic first impression. Then the more I played the more i came to realize that even though some of the core mechanics of DaS were improved, the game just isn't nearly as well-coded (which is saying something since the first game wasn't a model of programming excellence itself), the level/enemy/boss/world design is mediocre compared to the first, there wasn't nearly as much thought put into anything, and the difficulty is cheap, poorly executed, and generally just shows that the design philosophy of the game is completely different from the first.

The Youtube personality thing is true, but in the case of Dark Souls 2 I don't really think it applies. I've seen a lot more Youtubers praise it without saying why it's good than I have ones who criticise it without saying why it's bad.

The only relevant example of a popular Youtuber criticising it and swaying public opinion that I can think of is that Matthewmatosis critique of it, but I see it cited as an explanation of why people don't like the game often simply because it really nicely sums up a lot of problems that the game has and there isn't really any need to repeat the points he raises. He mentions the swarms of very strong enemies placed thoughtlessly all over tight corridors, the immersion breaking level design, the terrible enemy/boss variety and just about every other issue it has that we've all heard about by now. The one extra thing I would put into a critque of Dark Souls 2 is the fact that those dog things in the Gutter have hitboxes that come out long before their attack animations start. The point where I noticed that is when I stopped trying to convince myself that I was enjoying the game, despite really wanting to like it.

There'll always be bandwagoners, but the reputation that Dark Souls 2 has isn't without foundation, which is kind of what calling criticism of it a meme implies. It has features that I do really like, such as its introduction of cloth physics on capes and stuff, dual wielding being made interesting and the introduction of lances. In every other regard, it just felt like such a step back from the rest of the series. Even in terms of graphics I still think that Demon's Souls looks better than Dark Souls 2 despite the latter being objectively superior in terms of technology in that regard, because Demon's Souls has a good, consistent art style whereas 2's is all over the place.

kill him.

Definitively, I can say that I enjoyed the game despite all its faults, though I've got to admit that learning to like this game wasn't easy, given all the problems it has. I think my opinion has changed since launch and I've given myself time to play through it more thoroughly. Even so, I can see why people were left with a sour taste in their mouths and have, as a result, been unable to enjoy this game as much as its predecessors.
You're right, DaSII has earned its reputation through all of the negative aspects that it possesses, and I will not argue that point. I agree. However, I just feel like we're talking about two different subsets of idiots here. On one side, you've got the uninformed, biased, or shortsided fools who take other people's well thought out analysis and boil it down to a few specific talking points that then get repeated ad nauseam, and often these talking points are not representative of the original point they were derived from. On the other hand, you've got equally blind or zealous outliers that wish to defend this game from any and all criticism directed at it, and will do so by trying to dismiss people's umbrage as nothing more than nitpicking and shallow talking points.

I find it interesting that people might think that saying something is a meme is a way to discredit the argument or message. I don't think that's necessarily true. A meme is just an idea that spreads that manages to resonate with people. I think it becomes a problem with people take popular and well received ideas with a sense of religious sanctimony and prevent themselves from thinking about it.

Yeah, I've seen people link that critique I mentioned before and start off sounding moderate about the extent to which they dislike the game, then progressively get more and more hyperbolic about how bad it is as people defend or sidestep the flaws that it's outlined. Dark Souls 2 just seems like one of those controversial cases where disagreement about how good/bad it is leads to more extreme opinions coming from both parties.

You're right about the meme thing. I've seen the word diluted by so many captioned pictures and jokes without punchlines that I just kind of assumed that it was being used as a catch-all term for 'thing I don't like,' sort of like 'toxic' or whatever other buzzword. My bad.