[Youpi]

Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are horribly broken messes that nobody in their right mind would play once the amazing third episode that fixes everything is released.

Fixing everything is your responsibility.
Post your fixed third episode.
Vehemently condemn other people's terrible ideas.

I'll start.

If you expect to post your own idea of a fixed 3rd episode, you should probably think about your own reply before reading any further.







Damned Souls

The game world is a fortified city with no exit.
You find yourself awake, one night, naked in a small street, unsure whether it is the first day of your life, or if you have lived for a thousand years.
You are alone in the city, there is not even a single animal to be seen, but every wall has a lit torch on it. There is no way out of the walls of the city. If you climb a tower, you may see faint hints of an outside world: a broken bridge, the sea, the fog concealing the outline of a forest, maybe a blink of light in the distance.
But open any door in the city, and you will definitely see life. Monstruous life lusting for your life.
You will die. Only to find yourself waking up naked, in the same street.

Is there an exit? Is there a single human who speaks your language?




The #1 assumption the game will make: metagamers gonna metagame. Give the veterans what they want the second time around, but make the intended playstyle the path of least resistance (the path of least resistance should resist fiercely).

Unless otherwise specified, assume that everything from Dark Souls is kept as is, with thematically relevant names and representations (bonfires, estus flasks, etc).



Mechanically, the following changes are made to the Dark Souls engine:
- Bows stay weaker than swords, but your lock-on range scales with DEX, and around DEX 50, it is twice that of Dark Souls 1.05. Also, you can aim as low or high as you want.
- Pressing the left anlog stick switches you to an FPS view, with a reticle for ranged attacks. You can still fight, roll, use items, etc, but you can't lock on. You can leave the mode with nothing locked on by pressing the left stick, or with the centermost target locked on by pressing the right one.
- Rings are no longer used for online features, and there is no "master ring" some characters will want to wear at all times (cling ring, ring of favor). You can always wear two buffing rings without sacrificing online features.
- You can tattoo your body once you meet an artist. Tattoos have various non-buffing effects, akin to preferences and covenant effects. Some are mutually incompatible (same body part). You can remove tattoos in a process involving gruesome implied body horror.
- Backstabs are much less powerful, except with daggers, which are not so useful in an honorable fight.
- Clusters of intelligent enemies can often communicate. No selective aggro and kiting except for the dumbest zombies.




Death becomes painful:
- There is no longer any distinction between soul/body form. You always revive fully alive (i.e., fully online).
- Upon death, you lose absolutely everything: souls, items, armor, and weapons. You only keep your memories (stats and attuned spells), and your tattooed body.
- You can still touch your own bloodstain. With a twist: other people can, too. They can be content with observing your death, but sinners can pillage your remains. (Read more to see why they might want not to do it)
- You can stockpile items safely in the city. But you will lose them if you take them with you and die, of course.
- You will eventually meet NPC who will remove some of the sting of death, but for a price much too high to make use of all of the available services. For example, you might be able to free a blacksmith, who will forge your favorite weapon as often as you want, and give them to you when you revive. But do you prefer to respawn with a shield and a straight sword, or a greatsword+2? (You can't upgrade equpiment as much as you could in previous episodes. At most, something like +5)
- Every enemy drops every single piece of equipment they had on them. Rare drops are indicated by the traditional orbs: if all you can loot on a corpse are the armor and weapons, no orb appears over the body.
- There is both a carry weight and equip weight system, like in Demon's Souls. As a beginner, you can give yourself a small edge by looting a few weapons and suits or armors and dropping them to your stockpile, but it should not be something experts feel required to do.




There is an arena in the city:
- When you walk through one of the two gates, an opponent is guaranteed to appear very soon from the opposite gate. No level matching. Every single person who plays the game can fight against you one on one, you'd better be prepared for anything. Keep a system of harsh diminishing returns after level 120: any further leveling will diversify your abilities instead of making you stronger.
- You do not lose anything when you lose a fight in the arena, but winning is rewarded.





The city as a hub for procedurally-generated labyrinths shared by a small group of players:
- There are about 20 doors in the city which lead to a sprawling, interconnected, procedurally-generated underground. The levels would all use different algorithms, to give them a sense of place in subsequent playthroughs, even with different layouts. Some layouts are organic monstrosities, some are elegant pieces of architecture, some remind you of the chaotic patterns of cellular automata, and one of the levels is just plain non-euclidean. The procedural generation happens beforehand on servers: this way, a lot of automated testing can be done on the levels before they are pushed to the players. The levels must be, at least in theory, winnable by any character archetype.
- You can enter about half of the levels right from the start of the game. Obviously, the game doesn't give a fuck about whether you can handle the local fauna.
- Every procedurally-generated level will be pushed to the first 12 players who go through the door, then a different level is sent.
- If someone else is playing the same level as you are, then there is no distinction between "your world" and "my world": you share the same space as physical bodies that can interact. You can attack each other, unless you both share a tattoo of peace (which is concealed by armor, armor you can remove to show the distinctive tattoo). Will you choose to kill each other? Will you be allies? Will you be a traitor? Will you have no tattoo of peace and accidentally hit your ally, and fail to apologize fast enough?
- Enemies respawn as fast as they would in a NES game. Want to go back? Prepare to fight again. It will make synchronizing game worlds easier.
- The level will stay the same for two or three days, unless you use a very rare item (1 per playthrough and player, not available from the beginning: huge potential for stupid griefing) that will re-roll the level immediately - for you AND every other player sharing your level (you will still end up with the same people). Normal players are expected to be able to clear levels alone in about 5 hours their first time around, 1 hour for veterans, 30 minutes for a party with a veteran.
- Nobody enters the level from the same place: you can't just hang around the entrance and find allies.
- There is a boss at the end of every level, and imprisoned NPC you can free. The NPC are always the same in every level, but their location random. NPC will generally go to the city and stay there.
- Many enemies are free roaming, and any humanoid you'd expect to be intelligent should have a good AI. (In previous games, named NPC had very unpredictable AIs, but strong regular enemies like black knights were mostly following set patterns.)
- The connections between levels are done through long tunnels, sometimes filled with enemies, so that the entrances and exits are not in fixed places.
- Invasions in other people's worlds are still possible, you are not limited to the people sharing your level. Invaders still can't access the primary healing system. Invaders have an incentive to kill anyone they meet: upon invasion, enemies might become ad hoc allies.
- There are also avengers, like the Darkmoon, who only have one specific target, and no particular incentive to kill (or not to kill) players they do not target. Upon invasion, the target of the invader is clearly announced.
- Sometimes, a level will lead you outside of your own world, to a world with a different cluster of 12 players. You have no incentive to do anything in particular in that other world, but can do anything you want.
- You can still leave messages, but instead of ratings, you can reply to, and vandalize any message. Your own name and the name of every player you have met becomes a part of the vocabulary you can use in messages. "Seek honorable Doniqua to the North" - "Be wary of traitor Samonar! — This message is pure slander -Samonar."
- If you don't play for a few days, fresh levels are re-rolled: you will always meet people.




Basic RP is encouraged:
- You can't give the name of your choice to your character, because you would pick xXxcR1MSoNSN1pERxXx. You roll your name. It is generated by various sets of elaborate and coherent lists and context-free grammars of syllables forming names (which sets are used is very strongly influenced by your chosen gender and ethnicity). Your name is not followed by the name of your city or country: as far as you know, there is no such thing as an outside world.
- When you meet another player, you only see the name of their character, not that of the player, and they do not appear in the list of players met (Bet that's against MS and Sony's huge list of policies but whatever) ; you cannot communicate with them except through gestures.
- There are tons of gestures, all of them unlocked from the start. Select/Back puts you in Gesture Mode, and every single button on the controller triggers a gesture (select cancels gesture mode).
- You can find a rare item that allows you to request to know the real identity of the other player, but the other player must agree (the item is only consumed upon agreement). It removes the awkwardness shy people might experience in meeting someone first as an opponent, then as an ally: if the meeting happens as different characters, neither of them have to know about it! You can choose to have an asshole character and a honorable character, and RP them without hatemail. You can chat with text (just type things on a keyboard and press enter, instead of the long wait caused by the Live or PSN interfaces) or voice once you both agree to know each other's identity. The languages the other player speaks will be indicated when you are given a chance to become friends - no point in accepting the request if gestures are indeed the only language you have in common, and it gives you plausible deniability to refuse sharing your identity but stay allies: maybe you don't have a language in common.
- You can purchase very expensive symbols of friendship from a secret merchant (whom you can only find when your first loop is almost finished, but can find right from the start of a NG+), and drop them or send them to players you've shared your identity with, or to your contacts on your Live/PSN account. If they accept it (they are presented with a yes/no answer) then they can access your city at any time, and follow you anywhere. You can have more than one friend, but only one friend can come to visit your city at the same time. When they die, they respawn in your world, and they can take and put anything they want in your stockpile (but not theirs).
- You can purchase semi expensive gauntlets from the same secret merchant. Same mechanic as symbols of friendship, except if the other player accepts, then they become your nemesis, and can invade you in every single level so long as your levels match - but so can you invade their own world! There is a 20 minutes cooldown period between invasions. You can have up to 3 rivals per character, if you have more than one, you do not choose which of them you invade. Banishing a rival should be a costly process, unless you didn't meet them for a few days.
- It is impossible to have a friend or nemesis on your first loop an a new character, it's purely a NG+ feature.




Being a dick has lasting consequences:
- The moral ambiguity of the indictment system is removed. While it is, in theory, meant to request being avenged, it is, in practice, used to concede you have have been defeated fair and square, so the winner can climb in the leaderboards. You can now indict any player you have met, for any reason (they do not need to have killed you).
- Indictments are made stronger by social proof across different levels (and therefore, different clusters of players). Being indicted only once has almost no effect. Being indicted by 4 people in the same level is not as severe as being indicted by 2 people in different levels.
- Being indicted gives you a lot of sin points: you can atone either by being killed by avengers, or by being imprisoned at the cost of some of your soul levels.
- Killing avengers gives you a few sin points (but much less than being indicted). A life of crime should be difficult, impossible to escape, but sustainable for the strongest.



Because only a few people are sharing the same level, those systems should allow for very interesting social dynamics to emerge, and very little room for gamers to be gamers and agree on rules that will allow everyone to play efficiently and stop having fun.

This idea of semi-synchronized procedurally-generated worlds sounds like the worst idea ever from the perspective of someone who has a pretty good grasp of how horrible the edge cases would be to debug, haha.





That was a dumb idea. Your turn.
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Twitter: @youpi

[Youpi]

You can make yours shorter! (You'd better have one.)
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Twitter: @youpi

[Youpi]

Duck Souls

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck: The Game



DS

The license is handed over to Ninja Theory for an edgier reboot that focuses on the cinematic dragon slaying action at the core of the Souls experience.
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Twitter: @youpi

[Youpi]

I don't think trying to make min/maxing harder to plan would be a problem if the game did its best not to let you screw up your character. Like, make every single distribution of stats possible workable. And have a lot more duplicate gear, with almost identical stats, but different looks. If they push you to just roll with whatever happens, they can't at the same time punish you for going in without a plan.

But hoping gamers won't be gamers will never work. More mystery will just mean more wikis.

Documentation Souls
The game ships without a manual. To start a new character, you must first plug in a kinect, headset, or USB microphone and whistle so that the bird on the title screen notices you.

A shadowy organization conspired before the game release to splinter the community across seven different wikis.

There is a wikia, which contains information about some of the enemies, and interstitial ads for heterosexual white women in your geolocated city.
There is a wikispaces, which contains information about all the weapons. However, searching the site only returns discussions (with no replies) where people ask how to find them and whether anybody can give them one, an what they offer in exchange.
There is a wikidot, which contains information about items, but u wont want of use it cause its all wrote w/ spellings.
There is a Japanese wiki which shows the location of all the secrets. Pictures are not allowed on that wiki.
There is a fan wiki. Only a few editors, but they are very knowledgeable about character builds. However, it also serves as the admin's Node.js and NoSQL playground, so it displays a 503 error most of the time.
There is a Strategy wiki, which contains a Table of Contents.
And there is an independent wiki with a lot of valuable information about No Limit Texas Viagra.

Will the Chosen Editor be able to unite all the wikis?
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Twitter: @youpi

[Youpi]

It would be cool if all the numbers were under the immediate control of a server, instead of a depending on patches. Then you could just spend the first month iterating the numbers quickly, A/B testing different values and collecting data about the results. Nobody will be able to tell, with the a game embracing mysterious server-side mechanics, why your sword does 10% less damage today.
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[Youpi]

The ratings on the messages in Dark Souls, which supposedly have five different portrait icons ranging from an undead (the only one I ever saw) to a picture of Oscar depending on their amount of ratings, the levels being hardcoded, really makes me think that as far as balancing is concerned, From is often satisfied to just release numbers that look good on Excel and seem to work well enough for the testers, then disregard the social factors and the western online gaming culture.

The big problem with PVP is that to remove the game of Bullshito Blade with number tweaks only, humans would need more HP. But to offer interesting PVE, humans need to be frail in comparison with the larger monsters. Screwing with the current damage model, or making the humanoid HP range wider than 200-2000 would ruin the wonderful physicality of the world.
What I like about DS PVP fights when they work as intended is that the engine is slower than most action games: it is mostly about tactics, more blitz chess than street fighter. The only skill required to execute your tactics correctly is, in general, not to panic.
Removing techniques like the backstab, that'd be the low-hanging fruit to make the fights more enjoyable. No question it can take skill to pull off a good pivot, but I don't like the idea of DS fights being dominated by those who are the best at executing a simple technique. But of course, "lol u butthurt" is the general consensus of the dark souls community at large regarding the backstab issue.
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[Youpi]

But it can't be solved by sacrificing one of the most crucial aspects of the series, that every living things behaves in way that appears to be constrained by identical rules than those applying to you.
It would be ridiculous that a dregling can go down in one hit, a big black knight in four, and an actual human player thrice that.
There has to be an elegant way of balancing the pvp fights to be interesting and where the winner is generally the best overall fighter, instead of the one with the correct character and technique.
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