Board Thread:Dark Souls II/@comment-24.8.54.69-20140324145355/@comment-1961216-20140428173957

Cement Plant wrote:

The more I see of the game the more I can see where the OP is coming from. The Bullshit Factor boils down to several things:

- Stupid amount of tracking. I understand they wanted to make circle-backstab harder but this was probably the worst way to go about it.

- Oversized hitboxes. Especially problem with bosses; The Giants in the Gulch for example can hit you even if you clearly stand out of the range of their clubs, the hitbox is longer than the weapon model; in case of the Smelter Demon his sword's hitbox is easily 2-4x the width of its model.

- Rolling was heavily nerfed. There's much less i-frames now, and most people used to Dark Souls roll i-frames will call bullshit on getting hit mid-roll.

- Many enemies have very quick attacks with next to no windup, or attacks that start identically but have different execution speeds. This makes parrying almost a guess game.

I see most of the changes as a knee-jerk reaction to some of Dark Souls cheese, "fixed" in the simplest and most ham-handed way possible.

Enemies' tracking isn't any worse than it was in the original Dark Souls, especially where bosses are concerned. Like the original, the game generally intends for you to make heavy use of your invulnerability frames (which I admit do seem a bit more finicky than in the original) and many bosses are unable to track you if you move certain ways, e.g. the Royal Rat Authority / Sif Jr. being unable to hit you with all but two of his (heavily tracking) attacks if you stay directly underneath his nuts.

All in all, Dark Souls II has been much easier for me than Dark Souls 1, and Dark Souls 1 was rarely actually that difficult, with the occasional exception of forcing the player to fight 3+ enemies in a game that encourages you heavily never to fight multiple enemies - the only time Dark Souls II has been more difficult / bullshit has been when it throws even more enemies at you at once than DS1 does, Royal Rat Authority being a good example of that too.

I never bothered with parrying in either game - I've found a surprising amount of success as a berserker. I'll have to try it out in both games sometime to properly compare.

BUT HITBOXES.

Yes, it's quite obvious to me the hitboxes are not at all synchronized with the visual size of their respective attacks. The original had this issue too but it wasn't as obvious. Due to the focus on rolling this isn't as much of a problem with bosses (who you generally shouldn't expect to be able to block if you're not a heavy build) since invulnerability is invulnerability, but with enemies such as Undead Citizen, who look just like the several other player-sized enemies and have next to no HP so a new player won't expect them to explode and kill them in one hit completely ignoring their shield from about double the visual range of their attack, it's a nightmare.