Talk:Raw (upgrade path)/@comment-25247371-20140815072418/@comment-65.129.94.222-20170718034733

I agree with the awc (or is is afm now) directly above me. Demon ruins and izalith are actually pretty solid all things considered, the relative dullness is more a factor of the genre, Borderlands and it's sequels, Diablo 3, Skyrim, and the like all get pretty dull towards the end. Maybe it's just really hard to balance RPG endgames, idk. Honestly DR/LI is my favorite of the endgame areas (BoC notwithstanding) primarily because it feels the most like a normal souls challenge, rather than putting otherwise early to mid-game enemies and layouts in and introducing a gimmick.

Also Demon Firesage, while a bit of a carbon copy of the asylum and stray demons is pretty fun and honestly the similarities make sense to me lore-wise, these guys are like demon guards/knights so of course they'd have similar equipment and training. Centipede Demon, lava notwithstanding, is a little frustrating but a much better application of the cramped and agressive type of boss found in the first capra demon. And, as DeMod puts it "Unending Relief of load" is an interesting concept and definitely a heart pumper for me. The oddball out is the good ol' chaos bed herself. Yeah she's awful but honestly her lore and the boss' tie to it is spot on and the suck is more the arena's fault (as it often is in soulsborne, in fact demon ruins basically proves this is the main flaw of the Taurus and Capra Demon fights) If she wasn't the bed of "let me knock you in my f**king hole" this boss could've been one of the better and more memorable (for the right reasons) ones.

Technically Izalith has a gimmick but unlike the others it doesn't require anything that's missable to work around as you get the answer in one of the Demon Ruins' boss' drops. As for the "performance issues" they really only pop up is areas like blighttown and New londo (very open, almost wireframe layouts) which shows that the problem lies in how dark souls' engine handles terrain rendering rather than a lack of optimization (i.e. miyazaki has a bit of a thing for scenery porn) although a Current gen remaster shouldn't have any performance dips at all and even then most of them aren't too bad to power through. As for the "limited" online options, suck it up, it's almost 2018 (i realise the original post was in 2014) and the souls-like genre is in full swing, including a few with PvP as a primary focus, just accept Soulsborne as the PvE focused experience that it is or start playing For Honor or Nioh or something.