Board Thread:Dark Souls II/@comment-16047389-20140430214818/@comment-1855630-20140506105832

Cement Plant wrote: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UScsme8didI this + about fifty other things "Without Miyazaki directing, this game might as well be fanfiction. The difference being, some fanfiction writers would have the good sense not to bring the spirit of every major boss from the last game." - Matthewmatosis

Personally I don't mind them bringing back the bosses, or ratheir their souls, from the first game. I actually think it works very well with the idea of continually linking the Fire over and over to keep the Dark Souls universe running, and with every era having its own "Lords" and its own "Chosen Undead". The problem here is not the idea, but the execution. The four bosses and how they relate to the Lord souls simply makes very little sense. Let's take it from top to bottom:


 * Lost Sinner is the one that works best. Witch of Izalith's attempt at recreating the First Flame fucked up things somewhat majorly: destroyed Izalith and turned almost everyone into mutants or demons. The scale of this cataclysm can be best surmised by the fact that Gwyn himself had to intervene and his Knights only managed to contain the city - when player actually penetrates it eons later, it is still crawling with demons and mutants, and Witch of Izalith is still very much alive, if you can call it that. Bottom line is, it is quite understandable that someone who inherited the soul of Witch of Izalith would be subject to feelings of extreme guilt, lock themselves in a tower, and punish herself for sins she did not personally commit.
 * The Rotten is where things get shady, because despite inheriting the soul of god of death, he has nothing to do with death. The Gutter is the poison/infestation area of the game just like Blighttown, and Black Gulch is poison through and through, with some fire thrown in for no discernable reason. The Rotten himself is a mass of writhing but very much alive bodies, and apparently obsessed with creation of stone poison-spitting statues. One could make a mental leap between being the former god of death and being obsessed with creation, especially since the boss cutscene hints he fails at it which upsets him somewhat, but it's an incredible stretch that is in no way supported by anything else in the game.
 * Old Iron King is even worse. Gwyn was the Lord of Sunlight, but Old Iron King is basically Diablo living in a lake of lava. How does a god of sunlight become a god of lava is beyond me, and to make things worse despite being the most powerful Lord he's an absolute pushover. Not that Gwyn battle in Dark Souls was particularly hard either, but Gwyn in Dark Souls split his soul twice(to Seath and Four Kings) then linked the Fire which at least physically left him a charred corpse, and even in this sorry state could still own an unprepared player. In Dark Souls 2 he is below Ceaseless Discharge in difficulty. Smelter Demon makes for a better Lord battle than Old Iron King.
 * Finally, we get the Seath, which is a giant spider for some reason. But the real problem here is Seath is even considered a Lord. Seath was never a Lord - while he did help the Lords against the Dragons, he never had any special power. He was given part of Gwyn's Soul as a reward for his help, but if that is enough to elevate him to a Lord level, then where in Dark Souls 2 are the Four Kings, who also had part of Gwyn's Soul and therefore also should be at the level of a Lord? If it wasn't for the soul of Gwyn, Seath would be nothing amazing, at about the level of Quelaag, yet the game in a way treats him as the most successful Lord who is somehow able to live forever by changing bodies. This makes no sense at all, especially when you consider that Seath's biggest problem in Dark Souls was precisely the fact that he couldn't live forever.

Speaking of Seath, there is an absolutely cringeworthy line by Tark if you talk to him after defeating Duke's Dear Freja, that "his master seethes through the ages". This is the obnoxious way Dark Souls 2 "hints" at there being a connection between the two games: every second NPC implies that Drangleic is Lordran, dozens of items either come straight from Dark Souls or mention it in the description, and there are even characters you personally encounter lifted directly from the first game, like Old Dragonslayer or Havel. This is what passes as "subtle" in Dark Souls 2: pretty much getting slapped in the face with references. It's like a child playing hide and seek trying to hide behind a curtain with his feet sticking out.

Matthewatosis mentioned how bad level design is in Dark Souls 2, as he should because it is indeed very bad. What he didn't mention was item and enemy placement. The first problem with item placement is that most of them are in chests, while most of items in Dark Souls were located on corpses for a very good reason. That reason being, having chests located everywhere from houses to caves to middle of a forest is completely illogical. Whenever chests were present in Dark Souls, they were all in "civilized" locations, in a place where you expect a chest to be. Chests in Dark Souls 2 were also made almost comically huge, probably so that the player will be able to spot them more easily. The placement of items themselves generally makes no sense in the context of the game world. For example, on the right side of the entrance to Drangleic Castle is a metal chest, just sitting out there in the rain, with a Fire Seed inside. Why is there a chest in front of a castle, and why the Fire Seed is inside when the location has absolutely nothing to do with fire or pyromancy? That's Dark Souls 2 item placement in a nutshell. It is also worth pointing out that in case of finding multiplies of items, it's almost always a neat number such as 3, 5 or 20, which only serves to underline how artificial all of it is.

As for the enemy placement, the main problem here is actually enemy misplacement. For example there are Grave Wardens in Earthen Peak, even though the location has absolutely nothing to do with graves or the dead, and the very description of items dropped by the Wardens flat-out states they should be located in the Undead Crypt. I can't help but think at some point during development someone thought they need a heavier enemy type in Earthen Peak, or simply another enemy type because otherwise there'd be only two, so they simply "borrowed" the Wardens and put them there even though it makes no sense whatsoever. Then you find Alonne Captains in Drangleic Castle, most likely for no other reason than the fact the developers wanted a ranged enemy stronger than the Royal Swordsmen and Alonne Captains was all they had. These are the worst examples, but many other enemies make little sense to be where they are, such as Hollow Mages in Brightstone or Royal Swordsmen in The Lost Bastille.

Dark Souls was very meticulous with its level design, item placement and enemy placement, so it's extra nice to see these areas of the game shat on in particular.

At first I considered the system to be the saving grace of Dark Souls 2, but the longer I think about it the less convinced I am. Let's start with the elephant in the room which is Adaptability(I will be using Adaptability and Agility interchangeably here to make the point clearer, yes I know Attunement raises Agility too). To make Resistance useful it was renamed Adaptability and now affects things like roll iframes, shield pull-up speed, stun recovery time and item usage time. The problem here is, to make Adaptability meaningful it had to affect these things in significant enough manner, and if it did so on top of the roll iframes, shield speed, stun recovery time and item usage time of original Dark Souls, it would be completely overpowered. Therefore all these had to be nerfed, with Adaptability being the way to bring them back to the Dark Souls levels. Not only is this as pointless as it sounds(nerf the Dark Souls animation speeds then introduce a stat to let the player improve them back again), it also means that playing with low Adaptability feels clunky and unfun, and you always start the game with low Adaptability. The end result is that it became a sort of a "mandatory" stat in the way Endurance was and most people, no matter their actual build, simply get the ADP to 20 and forget it exists. Having a mandatory, forgettable stat goes completely against the idea of having different stats in the first place, as it doesn't give the player any real choice.

Speaking of Endurance, it was split into two stats, one affecting the stamina and the other affecting carry limit. It changes absolutely nothing - instead of putting two points in Endurance, you put one in Endurance and one in Vigor and that's that. I simply don't understand why they did this, Dark Souls already had a lot of stats and if anything they should be merging them, not separate them further.

Remember: your Soul Level doesn't actually matter in Dark Souls 2 multiplayer, matchmaking is decided based on Soul Memory, which is based on souls gathered, not spent. Therefore it doesn't really matter for your character if you have to spend 40 points on Endurance or 80 points on both Endurance and Vigor. The Dark Souls 2 PvP community quickly adjusted to the new system by simply increasing the semi-official PvP build level limit - it was 120 in Dark Souls, it's 150 in Dark Souls 2, the extra 30 points used up to get the necessary Adaptability and to make up for the "split" Endurance stat, completely sidestepping the new higher stat requirements.

Probably the worst thing about the new system is the new weight limit hovewer. At first I was pleased to see that instead of using hard tiers the weight limit now affected your character's movement speed linearily, which meant much more flexibility in your build. But as it turns out, the actual movement speed is not affected at all - only the roll speed and (perhaps) stamina regeneration. This is a big problem, because the only breakpoint is 70% equip load, which is a dramatic increase from Dark Souls' first tier of 25%. This means that two characters, one at 25% equip load and one at 70% equip load will have identical movement speeds. Staying below 25% in Dark Souls was a big deal, as otherwise you could forget about circle-backstabbing most enemies and it was harder to get out of the enemy's range or back in after a dodge. This was of course balanced by the fact that to stay below 25% the character was pretty much restricted to light armor and a medium shield, which meant you took a lot of damage when hit and couldn't reliably block all attacks(because of the larger stamina drain of a medium shield). It was a tradeoff for the player to make, and perhaps more importantly it meant that three characters at the three encumberance tiers played differently. Dark Souls 2 single-handedly ruins all this by upping the limit to 70% and "forgetting" to linearily affect the player movement speed based on encumberance. Carry weight limit of 70% allows a character with 40 Endurance to wear a full set of medium armor and a greatshield... without even using equipment-load boosting rings. At best, it makes the already easy game even easier because medium armors allows for much more mistakes and greatshields let you block even boss attacks. At worst it ruins the replayability potential of the game, because every character plays more or less the same.

Which brings us to another major issue with Dark Souls 2... the difficulty.

The difficulty in Dark Souls 2 can only be described as schizophrenic. It's as if for every way they thought to make game more difficult, they also introduced a mechanic to make it easier. For example enemies track the player up until the last moment, but the new carry weight limit means you can carry much bigger shield so the necessity to actually roll is almost completely removed. They nerfed the roll to require very precise timing, but then gave people the Adaptability stat to bring it back to the Dark Souls level. They drastically limited the amount of Estus Flask you can carry, then introduced droppable healing items and a ring that regenerates your health. They "linked" mobs of enemies together so you cannot just pull them one by one anymore and they all react as a group, then drastically reduced the distance at which they chase you. Most of the bosses in the game are a joke and can be beaten simply by circlestrafing in the direction of the weapon they're holding with your shield up, but the normal enemies have been made more aggressive, numerous, and usually stronger. They actually introduced a penalty for dying, then gave players a ring early in the game that prevents them from losing anything at death that costs measly 3000 souls to repair. And so on.

The new team even managed to fail when it comes to something as simple as controls. Yes, even though they had controls of two previous games to build on, and all they had to do was to copy and paste them into their own game, they still managed to fuck it up. The movement analog stick has a very large dead zone when moving forward and you're expected to use the camera stick to slightly adjust the direction. Except even the camera feels unprecise, and even at the minimum sensitivity! Just playing the game feels like you're making an effort.

And yes, the "new team". People like to point out lack of Miyazaki as the reason for Dark Souls 2's shortcomings. But Miyazaki wasn't the only one missing: the entire goddamn team was missing. Making videogames is always a group effort, and I have little doubt that even without Miyazaki the original team could make a decent sequel to Dark Souls. Maybe not a completely new Souls game, but a sequel, certainly. But they basically gave the IP to a bunch of amateurs, and the result is a disaster.

And that is that. About everything I wanted to add to Matthewmatosis' Dark Souls 2 critique.