[UtilityFrog]

This video critique of Dark Souls 2 by Matthewmatosis recently came to my attention. It's 50 minutes long and contains spoilers for the whole of the game.

It's a mostly negative look at the game. I certainly don't agree with everything in the video but it's mostly well argued and I agree with the general thrust of it. Many design decisions in DS2 seem scattered and without a coherent rationale.

[diplo]

Valuable review even though it took 40 minutes to talk about how DS2 should have nothing involving Solaire and fuck praising the sun

[rye]

[mauve]

cracked blue eye invasions can take you anywhere in the game world more or less

that's part of why they are used a lot, you don't have to be anywhere near your mark in order to get summoned, even though it prioritizes where you are generally

from heide i invaded the same guy twice; once i ended up in amana, next time it was in the crypt.

if you want to be invaded or invade others, blues are at least as valid an option as bloods!

speaking of blues: http://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm23379287 the last one...
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twit

[Ronnoc]

I was walking around the Forest of the Giants because I forgot where the king's gate was, and I discovered a (huge) area I had missed the first time and then I got invaded by someone near my power level.

A+ Dark Souls experience

[rye]

Invaded by a blue sentinel in huntman's copse. I prostrated before him and then offered him my back, waiting for his sunlight blade-charged sword to drop.

He did not take it, and returned to his world instead.

I quit and turned off the game.

That's enough for today.
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[username]

I would suggest a combination of soul level and for lack of a better term "stat-based" measure for determining invasions. If you don't level up but grab a bunch of high level equipment/spells/whatnot then that in a perfect world would be taken into account. The main issue I see with that is that it'd have to be based on the strongest stuff the player has on them as opposed to what is currently equipped because if not the invader could just switch to something stronger once matched up, and how one would actually fairly balance all that out hurts my head to even think about.
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http://www.audioatrocities.com/games/castlevania-sotn/clip1.mp3

[mauve]

soul memory for NG

soul level for NG+

best of both worlds

i am tempted to figure out how best to rush NG down to make an asshole invading character early though, i can see how it might be done...
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twit

[another god]

Dark Souls 2's mechanical improvements are so interesting that they are completely obfuscating the step back in level design and utter collapse in lore.
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interdimensional

[Joachim]

i'm actually finding the lore more interesting, by and large
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[diplo]

OK gonna try to make a comment that's longer than three sentences hurrghhhhh here goesss There's a lot that's glossed over in that review -- a lot of comparative congratulations handed to Dark 1 and Demon's that I don't think are entirely deserved. That's a bit natural, given how massive the critical discussion about these games can be, since they are dense games, but there is also a degree of oversight; although I am sympathetic to many of the opinions (and it sure is nice to have an essay that pushes against the supposed YOU DIED fetish; as I said to rye elsewhere, when I got the "Welcome to Dark Souls" trophy, that was about the hardest I internally rolled my eyes at the game). Like, you know, running through the Kiln just isn't that interesting, even while the austerity and thematic relevance its enemy lineup has is somewhat pleasing. There's nothing that says you couldn't fight two simul-aggro'd black knights at once, really, yet the endgame area has you enemy-by-enemy face off against slowly attacking foes whose threat level by then is next to nothing and who can't keep up with you anyway if you choose to run away through the spacious environment.

I, and I think many others here, agree about the lacking imagination in a number of 2's boss designs. But I don't mind most of the multi-enemy boss fights; the exceptions would probably be the Royal Rat Authority, TW and TD, Belfry Gargoyles, and Twin Dragonriders. To me, at least in my limited experience, there are a variety of particularities to the ones in question that make them more tolerable than might be expected (and there are particularities to the four unsuccessful ones I mentioned that make them specially unsuccessful). For example, the Skeleton Lords have very slow movement, and the arena has a variety of places to seek temporary shelter behind; the Ruin Sentinels can lose their shields, and you can fight the first one all on its own; and the Tseldora congregation is a combination of small lifebars and sluggish movement (it seems a much, much more reasonable fight to me than the comparable Fool's Idol, too). I don't mind the spiders in the fight with Freja because they don't have the boss-lifebars -- and that comment extends to pretty much all fights that include minor enemies.

MM's comment about players opting to run through gauntlets like the path to the Crypt's boss didn't make sense to me because, as far as I can tell, it's next to impossible to enter the fog gates without getting hit and knocked out of the entry animation. Those last two knights on the mentioned path have a specifically limited range of pursuit so that you can't just ignore everything. And until these games figure out how to make one-on-one with normal or close-to-normal enemies reliably satisfying affairs, I'm fine with having to engage small groups of non-grunt opponents.

That thing between the blacksmith and his daughter was unknown to me. Seems they were going for a kind of cute relational disconnect/irony, and it's incredibly cheesy. Also yeah pretty much all of the explicit references to Dark 1's Greatest Hits (god did I groan when I saw that item description for the lightning bolt) are unneeded, unappealing, and shouldn't exist. Craft your own Greatest Hits, Dark Souls 2. Agreed about the questionable-to-outright-dumb visual justifications for some of the level design's impediments; agreed about the excessive vagueness of the plot itself; agreed about the disappointment felt when the mansion turned into a hallway to the boss; agreed that the game could've stood to have more areas like the Bastille; agreed about the mistake made in identifying the character's gender as male in the opening movie. And the fact that some of MM's critiques can be met with "But [x] did it too" is an additional problem.

[scratchmonkey]

[diplo]

Abridged conversation in response to part of the review:

[TXTSWORD]

Mimics can be tested for, though - which you should learn pretty quickly (after dying to one).

I dunno if I can really take "you have to die from stuff to learn to not die from it" as a valid critique. That's just the style of the souls games.

[mauve]

[Ronnoc]

I have died to every mimmic

[misadventurous]

ive decided this one's inferior mostly because your character is too shiny & the camera is right up their butthole. its harder to take in crucial details like those guys sitting above the salamander cave. i don't know if i appreciate all the mechanical changes either. hitboxes feel very sloppy and the action's kind of mushy in a way i'm not always into. demon's souls is my favorite anyway tho and this one feels like the opposite of that in many ways.

i do love the individual areas as COOL ENVIRONMENTS though. i'm in the shrine of amana atm and it's difficult & beautiful. i'm sort of into the dreamy disjointedness of the world too. it feels more like king's field to me than the first game.

[misadventurous]

[Guillotine]

I expected every chest to be a mimic or a trap, so I was ok. you can attack any chest ONCE without consequences. Also I'm pretty sure they have different details, but it's hard to see in the dark of course.
Frankly the (very)occasional OH SHIT moment really works for me in DS, even when the level design doesn't suggest things, you have the ever explicative blood pools, the occasional ghosts or the messages, which is better to not abuse surely, but just seeing one can be good enough.
Of course these things are in Souls to stay, and the developer shouldn't count on them as a substitute for design, but I don't really see DS2 as being so bad in this regard that is a worrying trend.

[UtilityFrog]

[UtilityFrog]

[scratchmonkey]

[UtilityFrog]

[diplo]

[diplo]

[diplo]

[scratchmonkey]

I never found that ring either. Apparently a combination of that, orange burrs, flash sweat and rolling through water urns is necessary to be able to survive running around on those.

[mauve]

flash sweat and burrs do not stack.

elemental defense right now works on a percentage basis; 10 def is a flat 1% damage reduction. (great magic barrier is like 250 for all elements. use this if you can, especially pvp! seriously weakens elemental weapons.) get up past 1000 and you are literally immune to that element. i don't know if this is possible for anything but fire, though: fire def armor + flash sweat + water urns.
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twit

[TXTSWORD]

[username]

Random question: did they futz around with the way your weapon interacts with walls in this game? I only ask as I had an instance where an enemy charged at me in a narrow hallway and I by instinct took a very wide swing with a rather long weapon and instantly cursed myself under my breath as I knew my weapon would hit the wall, not reach the enemy and I'd eat a big hit. Instead I struck the enemy with no problem. I could have just caught a lucky break in terms of spacing but in that moment it felt rather odd.
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http://www.audioatrocities.com/games/castlevania-sotn/clip1.mp3

[mauve]

yeah it feels a bit different now. it seems harder to clip your sword through a wall, as well.
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twit

[diplo]

Info dump.

[diplo]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelthomsen/2014/04/25/is-dark-souls-ii-the-worst-game-ever-made/

Jesus.

Young man has first Why Videogames? crisis, channels despair into crypto-review.

[Ronnoc]

[Ronnoc]

[A New Duck]

Oh my god, what a find.
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3DS/PokéMagic Friendz Code: 1289-8272-6032

[Rei]

[A New Duck]

His Twitter tells me he thinks Demon's Souls is one of the greatest games of all time.
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3DS/PokéMagic Friendz Code: 1289-8272-6032

[Rei]

[Broco]

"There are many eerie parallels between Metroid Prime and Citizen Kane."

OK.

[Rei]

When Samus dies on Metroid Prime's game-over screen,

if you have the volume turned up high,

you can hear her whisper,

"Rosebud"

just before she flatlines.