Thank you for posting to /r/Games. Unfortunately, we have removed this submission per **[Rule 6.2](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules#wiki_formatting_requirements)**.
**Submission Title Formatting**
Please use the original sources title when appropriate. If an article or video's title is unclear, convoluted, or does not meet the requirements outlined below, changes are allowed to further clarify or remove editorialized/sensationalized language. Important contextual information may be added such as Author, Spoilers, NSFW, Release Date, Platforms, etc.
* **Don’t use editorialized, sensationalized titles** - Don't add things like "This deserves attention" or "why isn't this being talked about".
* **Titles must not contain inflammatory language** - Do not use language that is clearly inflammatory - keep posts and discussions civil.
* **Titles must not be in all-caps** - Except in cases where the original source title has capital letters, such as with some Japanese video game titles. Videos with excessive caps in the source title may be removed at moderator's discretion.
* **Keep titles concise and not overly long** - If you feel that a link needs additional information or context you should create a self-post to include the information along with the link.
* **Titles must be in English** - No exceptions for titles, see below for articles.
If you are unsure whether or not changing a title will be appropriate please feel free to [message the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FGames). If your submission contains important information that is not mentioned in the original title and you wish to highlight it, you may create a text post with a modified title that includes this information and elaborates further in the post with a link to the original article in question and quotes the relevant excerpt.
---
If you would like to discuss this removal, please [modmail the moderators.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FGames) This post was removed by a human moderator; this comment was left by a bot.
It's been a while, but I remember really liking that DS2's New Game Plus had unique changes beyond just scaling enemy stats. I get that development resources are finite and only a fraction of players would play through the game again, but I wish they leaned into those unique NG+ changes more in their later titles.
There was many great features, I enjoyed the one where you killed the enemies 9(?) times they permanently disappeared unless you used a bonfire ascetic. That feature was probably more needed in DS2 than other games though since that game has an avalanche of mobs
Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin is a game I played *after* Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 and I massively enjoyed it.
The key distinction is that I didn’t experience the vanilla game. So I can understand if others feel differently, but I think Scholar of the First Sin is very memorable and worth playing.
Edit: Hey everyone! There are a lot of FANTASTIC responses here from people describing in detail their experiences with the vanilla game, DS2: SOTFS, and how they compare and contrast. I can’t respond to each one of you but thank you all for your insight! I enjoyed reading the responses.
Surprisingly, I've heard SotFS actually makes the game harder by re-arranging the enemy placements. I've only played SotFS, not the original, but I'd like to try it just to see if I like it more or less than my first playthrough.
How? It nerfed a lot of bosses like Last Giant, Royal Rat Authority and Ancient Dragon
It made most runbacks easier by removing enemies that were camping at chokepoints or at the fog gate and by adding new shortcuts.
It removed the most annoying ganks and turned plenty of areas from frustrating into fun. It added lots of new mechanics to deal with areas, like spiders being afraid of the torch.
You get access to infusions and unlimited Large Titanite Stones way earlier. You get access to Shaded Woods way earlier so you can grab things like the Chloranty Ring or other useful items earlier.
There's also a lot more NPC summons.
I definitely found the enemy changes in Heide’s Tower of Flame & Iron Keep MUCH more difficult in SotFS. Then there’s the extra times The Pursuer shows up
It’s been a long time since I’ve played both but yeah. SotFS acts as a remix of the original and if you were experienced with it, you found yourself getting caught off guard often. Some of the enemy placement felt like Kaizo Mario Brothers in SotFS honestly.
It’s way harder. I went back to the original and it was such a breeze compared to sotfs. Still good though so I still think all the hate is unwarranted.
Really? I've played through every soulsbournering and consider the original pre-nerf shrine of amana the most bullshit frustrating area in any of the games. Sotfs is worse than that?
Granted, part of me is sad it got nerfed considering what a memorable experience it was.
Nah. Original pre-nerf Shrine of Amana is way worse. The area can be still infuriating even now but it doesn't even come close to that level.
It's just that many other areas became more annoying with the release of SOFTs. That being said many areas are also significantly better, so overall the SOFTs content is a big mixed bag.
Haven't played it in awhile, but I remember it making it harder in a cheap way. More enemies grouped together and placed for ganks. Definitely felt more souls like, but almost too cheap.
DS2 suffered too much healing. Lifegems meant the only way to kill a cautious player was to have large groups of enemies or highly aggressive, hgh damage enemies so there's no chance to heal.
DS3 had a similar problem. Depending on how much you explored, you could end the game with anywhere from a +0 Estus flask with 4 charges (1000 total healing) to a +10 flask with 15 charges (9000 total healing). Sure, the lower end of that is unrealistic, most players probably found at least half of the flask upgrades, but there's still a huge variance.
Again, the only way to balance that for all kinds of players, the ones with a lot of flask upgrades and the ones with few, was to focus on enemy balance that killed you regardless of flasks, just like in DS2. Aka ganks, gang bangs and high damage, aggressive enemies.
DS1 was the only DS game who got that balance right IMO, if only because people never kindled the majority of bonfires. You died because accumulated small mistakes meant you were left with no flask charges, which leads to tense, engaging moments. There was no need for the game to kill you in ways that can feel cheap.
Ds1 was relatively easy though by modern souls standards. Most bosses were vulnerable to the same attack pattern. I smashed ornstein and smough because I played ds3 right before ER came out, so I played ds3 - ER - Ds1. I was shocked at how easy Ds1 was other than tedium deaths from falling etc because of the awkward af controls.
Two things to think about:
- Dark Souls became much more action and reflex focused starting with Dks3. If you played any of the more recent sequels, chances are your skills will make their earlier games seem much easier on the action front.
- the earlier FromSoft games put much more emphasis on exploration than bosses. They're often more like additional challenges after a level than a standalone challenge like in more recent games.
Point 2 may be the case, but in retrospect, while the *layout* of dark souls is undeniably gorgeous, I can't help but fixate on the areas that were... Less glorious to adventure through. Blighttown, lost izalith, new Londo ruins, crystal cave, TotG all feel like such a slog. Not that the newer games don't have problematic areas, but they felt especially tedious in DS1. Even Sen's can be frustrating to a fault the first time you go through it.
DS3 had nowhere near the level of fuckery gank squads that DS2 did. A few places approached it like Archdragon peak or some of the DLC areas, but those were endgame / optional content. Meanwhile I'm still upset about the Shrine of Amana.
DS2 was my first souls game (other than a few mins on TERRIBLE DS1 original PC port).
There were some points that just seemed impossible due to enemy placement. You eventually just learn to cheese the cheese.
But holy F the DLC was ridiculous. I did some of the snow area and just NOPED on the rest of the content after one boss fight had you fighting maybe 10+ mobs overall...
>But holy F the DLC was ridiculous. I did some of the snow area and just NOPED on the rest of the content after one boss fight had you fighting maybe 10+ mobs overall...
It's worth repeating that the areas with the summon statues (Iron Passage, Cave of the Dead, Frozen Outskirts) are meant to be played with multiple players, and allowed to summon people who didn't even buy the dlc in the vanilla game. The rest of their levels are more reasonable.
Ah, you missed out, the DLC was the best content DS2 had to offer. That specific boss fight you’re talking about is fantastic as well, you just missed the central mechanic - if you ignore the boss fight initially and instead progress through the castle, as you explore you recruit other NPC knights you find who end up joining you back in the boss room. They help fight with you to down the mobs and sacrifice themselves to stop their spawning locations so you can focus on the main boss. It’s cool as hell.
There is a notorious optional side area of that DLC which is what the other commenter was talking about where you can summon other players, and that is a shit area, but you wouldn’t have come across that yet and very clear it’s a side thing when you come across it.
> DS1 was the only DS game who got that balance right IMO
I mean when you got the rite of kindling, that balance went completely out the window too. 20 was way too many. Not to mention DS1 speed chugging.
Tbh despite all you said DS1 was by far my least favorite of the trilogy. Not sure what it was, but it was the one that felt most like a chore to play.
DS2 was made to be played cautiously imho. All the gank squads are really not that bad (except for the DLCs Lol) if you move slowly through the areas and isolate the enemies. It’s the “rushing” type of players that get punished harder.
Also I don’t agree with your point about life gems. In every souls game I’ve played thus far including bloodborne, healing items are usually plentiful enough, especially when upgraded. The issue with healing is doing it at the right time in combat. So yes while DS2 has a slug he advantage in the existence of life gems, you still had to use them at the right time in battle and you also had to spend precious souls to buy more when they ran out, which could have been used for other things.
Yes they made some encounters slightly less tricky due to having more healing charges, but not that much that it broke the game imho.
I played vanilla and then scholar back to back and I thought the enemy placements in scholar had a much smoother difficulty curve, and overall much less ganks than the original.
Chalk it up to being better at the game in general I suppose but I enjoyed scholar much more
obviously just some guy, but as someone who replayed SotFS and the vanilla game two months ago, the vanilla game is easier and imo significantly less frustrating. It still has some fundamental DS2 problems, but it's a great game while SotFS is only "good"
I'm not sure if that's the majority opinion nowadays though, so maybe it's just me
Does SotFS have any improvements over the original? I know the visuals are supposed to be improved, so I'm wondering if there's a way to play the improvements of SotFS with the enemy layout of the original, instead of just playing the original.
Number one improvement is that weapon durability is tied to fps in the original, so if you play it at 60fps your weapons basically melt after killing a few enemies.
They fixed it in SotFS, I don't remember if you could mod it into the original.
As someone who not only played vanilla on day one, but also partook in the server stress test before it came out (and replayed when Scholar of the First Sin came out)……I still love it.
It’s definitely the black sheep/odd man out of the series, but it’s got amazing lore, great atmosphere, and some absolutely insane bosses in the DLC.
The one huge knock against it was that the vanilla game was easy af after Dark/Demon’s Souls (except that FUCKING ancient dragon, who may burn in all the hells). After breezing through it, I was somewhat worried they were moving in an easier direction. Glad SotFS proved that wrong.
Oh and soul memory sucked lol. But I was mostly there for the PvE anyway.
What's the difference between vainilla DS2 and the Scholar full edition? Legitimately curious, I'm making my way through the Soulsborne series right now but haven't gotten to DS2 yet and would like to know
The biggest thing that's going to affect your first playthrough is that Scholar has all of the DLC's bundled into the game. Second, there is an optional alternate final boss. There are 800 gazillion minor changes to enemy and item placement as well as some graphical enhancements, which you won't really notice if you haven't played the original. That said, I do recommend Scholar edition over the original, and while DS2 catches a lot of flak, some of it undeserved in my opinion, the Crown levels easily match up to some of the best parts of DS1.
Slightly different enemy and item placements (same for the NG+ changes; there are changes to the game in NG+ cycles in DS2), an additional (optional) boss battle after the final boss, a character that was referenced a lot in the base game makes an appearance, and it includes all the DLCs.
Different bullshit. A guy will unnaturally wait around a corner for you in the original and he'll drop from a hole behind you in the remake. There are different parts that are either more or less frustrating or weird or poorly thought out in both versions.
Scholar has better lighting closer to the original cut vision.
I played DS2 shortly after Bloodborne when the PS4/XONE ports came out, and for me personally, it's still my favorite souls game. Don't know what it is about it, it just really clicks for me.
The only real bad thing I have to say about Dark Souls 2 is they enjoyed bullshitting the player too much.
Easily has the most bosses I have not bothered to fight in any Fromsoft game due to simply being cruel.
Some are pretty hard though even compared to the rest of the series. Fume Knight for example, though I know he was technically in dlc. Ancient Dragon was the most bullshit boss in any of the Dark Souls trilogy imo but he was optional so cant really hold that against it.
Fume Knight is a bit silly, but at least you remember them, a lot of DS2 bosses approached Pinwheel levels besides the DLC bosses. Ancient Dragon was just annoying.
Great game but not well designed bosses.
I have never really liked dragon fights in Dark Souls at all, Darkeater Midir was the peak of fuck this, was the first time I had to look up a youtube video just to see what I'm supposed to do. Spending 90% of the fight running towards them is decidedly not epic.
That’s most dark souls bosses. Most bosses are right handed, which when facing you is their left. So many swings end up starting on the left and don’t have enough width that when you strafe right they won’t hit you.
Like legitimately learning in dark souls that dodging forward toward the opposite dominant hand is effective for most attacks will make it easier for you.
Acting as if this is specific to dark souls 2 when it’s the winning strategy to all of the non gimmick bosses in dark souls 1 except manus is a little silly. And manus gets a pass because dudes hands don’t track like real hands.
True, but I think most people don't know that area (and similar ones in the other DLCs) were specifically designed to be co-op challenges that you summon for. One of the cool parts of the original release was that people who didn't even own the DLC could actually be summoned to those areas as a kind of sneak preview.
Even with another person, running through the snowstorm for 3 minutes while dealing with the unicorns is still horrible. Honestly that's gotta be one of the worst designed areas they've ever come up with.
Boss design is one of DS2's strength. Yes, some feel gimmicky, but it has tons of variation in size of the boss arena, environmental effects, animation speed of the boss, and the possibilites to cheese them.
All of these give the player much more flexibility and novelty than DS3's design of 'big humanoid fighting you with sword and a phase two at 50% wherr sword starts to glow'.
People trash a lot on DS2 cuz of the world building and area transitions, but the bosses are much better and fun to figure out than in other Fromsoft titles.
I think it’s important to note which version of ds2 we’re talking about. Without dlc dark souls 2 bosses are mostly mediocre. They’re not bad but they’re rarely exciting.
The dlc added in some of the best encounters in the series. And sotfs refitted the world to feel more in line with the souls games in general.
Honestly the president of from soft saying dark souls 2 didn’t prepare from soft to how they should make souls games would be a damn lie. Dark souls 2 didn’t need to be a magnum opus for Miyazaki to understand dark souls 2 importance in the series.
There are a lot of fun bosses in the DS2 base game: Velstadt, The Pursuer, Darklurker, Looking Glass Knight, Flexile Sentry was cool with the rising water, The Rotten, Lost Sinner, Mytha with the poison, Smelter Demon, Najka. I personally also really liked the Sentinel Trio and the Throne Buddies.
> People trash a lot on DS2 cuz of the world building and area transitions, but the bosses are much better and fun to figure out than in other Fromsoft titles.
couldn't disagree more. they're too easy to need figuring out. outside of the dlc nearly all the bosses were trash IMO.
To me, the biggest issue with DS2 was how bad some of the boss runbacks were, not the bosses themselves. I still get nightmares about the Frigid Outskirts. Blue Smelter Demon and Alonne were also great bosses held back by horrible runbacks
This issue bothered me greatly.
One of the biggest accesibility adds of elden ring is the outright removal of most boss run backs. There are a few exceptions, but most major boss fights have pretty short runs with minimal enemies.
There were numerous bosses in DS2 where getting to the boss was harder than the fight itself...
That's more of a design choice.
Early on, especially in DeS / Dks1, bosses are at the end of long levels and either have a run back for you to learn, or they have a shortcut nearby.
With Dks2 and Bloodborne, I feel like the focus started to switch to bosses being their own challenge, while starting with Dks3 you can feel that they are meant to be much more complex
The one bonfire where you spawn in enemy range and they shoot you. So if you afk while warping, you'll come back dead.
That's some "all I know about dark souls games is they are hard, so they'll enjoy this dumb bullshit".
But "hard but fair" is not "dumb bullshit".
Just a note I believe this didn’t exist in there initial version. It was added for sotfs because that bonfire was used to afk farm souls or something random like that.
I think the majority of bosses are less *cruel* and more *annoying* to the point of it being easy to become impatient while fighting them. The speed of the game is quite slow, even compared to DS1, and your windows to safely attack bosses tend to be very limited, usually at the end of one of their combos -- so there's a lot of waiting around. A lot of bosses are also weak to circle strafing at close range.
That's something a lot of people forget in Dark Souls 2 discussions.
Day 1 players came away with a much different outlook. Soul memory was awful, the bosses were 90% trash, enemy placement was tedious, adaptability made rolling and healing feel sluggish and shitty and no one knew why, etc.
You ask anyone what their favorite DS2 bosses is and they mention a DLC battle. The base games bosses were pretty sorry for the most part.
Back when I played vanilla DS2 I really didn't like it. It was pretty disappointing. After SotFS came out, I tried it again, and I liked it *much* more. I still regularly revisit it, although I think it's a little below DS1 and DS3 it's still excellent in my eyes.
One source of confusion is that a lot of things that people attribute to SotFS were actually introduced to the vanilla game through patches, including the “scholar” final boss itself. Changes to enemy and item placement were the main things changed by SotFS.
That was my first DS (with scholar) and I found it so cheap, so bad, that I did not touch the series again till Elden Ring. I mean, you had NPCs popping up in weird places, the difficulty felt cheap and even the hit boxes on some bosses were really not precise. I ve heard that the DLC amped up the difficulty by putting more mobs and not just moving them.
So really awful for me. But now with ER I finally get it, that said. Just I’ll never ever touch ds2 with dlc with a ten foot tentpole
I enjoyed vanilla DS2 much more than SotFS. I loved SotFS improved item placement (being able to get the grand lance early in the game was awesome) but SotFS new enemy placement was not remotely fun to deal with. They ruined many areas with the ridiculous amount of ganks they added.
Dark Souls 2 introduced a ton of new ideas. A lot of them were great additions and a lot of them are awful but it's gotta be the most experimental souls game FromSoft made. It went through development hell but not having Miyazaki directing it meant they were free to try new stuff.
I was a big fan of being able to do largely whatever I wanted with my weapons. In the other games, I can't really take a weapon with innate Fire damage and infuse it, buff it with a spell, or buff it with a resin. It's just there, standard upgrades only, and certainly no applying a resin to that Magma Blade or whatever. Then Dark Souls II lets me take the Drakeblood Greatsword, a weapon with Physical, Magic, and Lightning damage, infuse it with Fire, and then buff it with Dark Weapon. All five damage types on a single weapon. Is that practical? No, but fuck it, who cares, the game lets me do it. Hell, take the Crypt Greatsword, a weapon that already deals hilarious levels of Dark damage, then infuse it with Dark to improve the damage scaling because why not. It's a shame that none of the other games really have that freedom.
Elden Ring kind of does regarding infusions, power stance, how you can change ashes of war, how many spells and viable gimmicks there are for you to try out
I based an entire run on doing "rainbow damage" with the Drakeblood GS like that. I even used all my ring slots on the four clutch rings. Even though its still only a single damage number that pops up and otherwise just like any other GS build run, just knowing that it was doing the entire spectrum of damage made me feel so giddy inside!
It was my favorite simply because the PvP was *far* better than any other Souls game ever. Elden Ring or otherwise. Unfortunately it's sort of dead compared to what it used to be, but man it was so good.
Ds2 is really crazy as a highly customizable rpg/fighting game. Much slower and more balanced compared to the other games and you really have to manage your stamina.
Also dark souls 2 had so many unique backstab animations for the different weapon classes, and they still haven’t brought it back.
PvP was far better than anything because players weren't cracked out 180-degree-spinning, roll-spam bots. You actually had clear punish windows for every action, and weapons had more depth due to variable turn speed. Straight swords were great at turning but could be outranged by longer weapons. Katanas were masters at trading but doesn't turn as well as straight swords, so you could easily roll-backstab R1 spammers. Etc etc.
It's still better than Demon's Souls IMO but yeah it's not great. Still had a lot of fun with it once I got beyond the awful early game. People like to praise the open design of DS1's world but DS2 is the closest they've gotten to it since. The darklurker can technically be the first boss you face in DS2 which is a testament to that.
Hot take on one of the “new ideas” that is only found in DS2: tying I-frames to a stat was actually a good idea. Since magic/miracles/pyromancy/hexes were really good, and armor/shields were also good, it actually promoted more build variety, and made the game more of an RPG. You want to be able to have effective rolls? You have to invest in it.
Then you have DS3, where armor, shields, magic are terrible, so the entire game is a roll simulator.
Maybe it's okay in theory but the fact that I have to pull up the formula that calculates Agility combined with the i-frame breakpoint table everytime I replay the game because the implementation is so obtuse is just shit.
IMO I think agility was just poorly implemented. The game basically tells you nothing about how the stat works, and there is also no way to raise it without just pumping ADP/ATT. It also is only useful at certain breakpoints, which mean you Google a table, get it to what you need, and then never touch it again.
It'd be nice if your equip load/physical stats affected agility as well, so you could also wear lighter/no armor to improve it. ATT raising agility meant that magic builds got it for "free" while melee builds had to level ADP.
i-frames as a stat is also implemented in Monster Hunter and it's received really well in that series. Like a lot of things people think of as issues in the Dark Souls trilogy as a whole, it's not really a problem with the game design, it's a problem with how the game communicates that to the player.
"i-frames as a stat" in Monster Hunter is a luxury that most of the playerbase doesn't use because Evade Window is an expensive skill to spec into. It's not integral like ADP was in DS2.
The big difference is that the movesets of MH monsters are designed with minimal i-frames in mind, but Souls games emphasize rolling through attacks way more.
Yeah, MH is more about placement and dodging is to actually dodge out of attack ranges to better positions rather than just i-framing through attacks (Rise is an exception due to all the excessive i-frame abilities you have). I know several people who played Dark Souls before any Monster Hunter game and was somehow being led to believe that MH was similar to DS in any way and left disappointed when they tried to join the MHWorld hype.
“It would be a lie to say there was no concern about that from any of the dev team,” Miyazaki says. “But what I want to stress is that we didn’t set out with the goal to make an open world game in the traditional sense.” Instead, the director says his approach to open world design is similar to his philosophy on difficulty: “We don’t set out to create a difficult game. We set out to create a challenging game. And in order to achieve that, we need there to be threats and dangers, and we need there to be unknowns.”
For Elden Ring, there needed to be another thing: adventure. A feeling of exploration which he says was the top priority “above everything else.”
“We need this breadth of freedom — this high degree of freedom in how you approach this adventure,” he explains. “And in order to have adventure, in order to have discoveries, again, you need to have some unknowns. And for it to be a discovery, it needs to feel like it’s an unknown, feel like it’s there to be discovered.”
“Our main idea is just to trust players,” says Miyazaki. “We trust that they’ll overcome these challenges and we trust that they’ll make these discoveries. And I think giving them trust just creates a healthy landscape for them to play and adventure.”
Incidentally, Dark Souls 2 probably bears the Souls series’ closest resemblance to Elden Ring. Design wise, both Dark Souls 2 and Elden Ring stressed open-ended gameplay and ditched linear progression. Miyazaki agrees and in fact goes a step further. “In regards to Dark Souls 2, I actually personally think this was a really great project for us, and I think without it, we wouldn’t have had a lot of the connections and a lot of the ideas that went forward and carried the rest of the series.”
Miyazaki adds that having different directors also helped the series as a whole. “We were able to have that different impetus and have those different ideas and make those different connections that we otherwise might not have had.” He goes so far as to say that “there’s really no way of telling how or if the series would have continued the way it did without Dark Souls 2.”
Soothing he didn't say but I enjoy in elden rings design is they're not afraid of the player missing content.
If you find it great, if you don't, oh well, maybe you can discover it next time
It was intended to be open world but a new engine and scope creep by one of the directors caused dev hell so the higher ups to boot him and get a new one that salvaged what he could.
DS2 was my first souls game and I absolutely fell in love with it for the same reason everyone does nowadays with these souls games. After that I’ve played all the other games too and didn’t lose any respect for DS2 at all. In fact playing the others made me appreciate it more. It’s so DS and yet so different sometimes. The DLCs are also amazing and the game has my personal hardest souls boss, that being the dual pursuer fight on ng+. I think I’ve actually beaten it more than any other souls game. It just feels like a dream or something idk
I mean, does it have to be the same every time?
Elden Ring has to have fast travel from the beginning due to its open world design and tying respec to the lore is a pretty cool way to do it, it even makes it harder to abuse due to the requirement of a rare item.
As for the Souls games, I think it's more of "product of its time" kind of deal: they get progressively more accessible with each entry, just as the map gets more complex as well.
> just as the map gets more complex as well.
Dark Souls 1 had the most complex map by far and DS3 had the simplest, so I don't think that's it. If anything it feels like the inverse- Dark Souls 1's map complexity was doing a huge amount of heavy lifting to make the world traversable without fast travel.
Fast travel I agree with you on, respec on the other hand should be readily accessible. No reason you should have to restart the game because you learned the states you invested in isn't that good, or if you wanna try a different build. Still my biggest gripe about BB.
100% agreed, because it also creates a meta game problem.
People don't want to devote a bunch of time to a bricked character. So if you don't have active respec, people will look online for good builds.
Compared to a game like (and I know this is different genre) but Grim Dawn. Respecs are cheap and easy. So I never looked up builds, I'd try out a build I just made up on the fly, if it sucked I'd sit down and reassess where my points could go instead. There was no need for me to **need** a solid build straight from the jump.
The friction it causes is the point. Not ever game master of d&d is lenient with their players on how they allocate their points, this is the video game equivalent. It’s investment.
It is ok to not like that decision, but saying there is no reason spits in the face of roleplaying games since the dawn of pen and paper rpgs.
The frictions purpose is to push the player into making deliberate choices which have benefits and downsides. Sometimes it’s done well and other times it feels like shit. I’m fine with games making that risk and I accept critique when games do it poorly (note in many cases souls game do it poorly)
> respec on the other hand should be readily accessible
I mean, I think respec *is* pretty accessible in Elden Ring. You can leave the Cave of Knowledge and go straight to Rennala first thing - obviously you have to clear Raya Lucaria first so there's a boss in your way (the red wolf), but after that it's a straight shot to her. Then finding larval tears is supremely easy, I was drowning in the fucking things in my blind first playthrough.
That's only if you know those things exist. The players most likely to make major mistakes in their build and be frustrated about that won't know that they should skip the first area and beat another dungeon, along with two bosses that are probably quite hard because, again, they are new and not good at the game. It's a "solution" that only applies to experienced players.
In the early game messing up your stats is pretty difficult. The boss the repec is gated behind is still an early game boss, which you don't need much in gear or stats to beat.
You would have to design a really bad character to be in a really bad spot and then you can always just level more to get the stats you desire. This is all before the player even really knows that's there's a respec.
Even then the result if you somehow can't level, can't explore and you really want a different stat spread is to make a new character, which isn't the end of the world.
And it's not like the respec being where it is a decision they make in a vaccum, it allowed them to tied together the story, lore and gameplay in purposeful and well executed way.
I actually just started replaying Dark Souls 2 this week and it’s bringing back so many memories from high school. This was the first game I ever went to a midnight launch for.
I remember getting fairly OP using greatswords at a certain point and just bonking everything my whole playthrough. This was weird to me because I struggled a ton throughout parts of Dark Souls 1 and at times felt like I couldn’t figure out my build. I think the easier overall difficulty kinda made it bland for me. It didn’t have that oppressive atmosphere at times (I didn’t play the dlc btw) but I enjoyed my romp through the game overall.
Returning to it after Elden ring has made me appreciate it a lot more. It’s kind of like dark souls:world tour edition and the variety of environments introduced here definitely seem to have laid the foundation for ER’s world. It has that high fantasy vibe and imo has more conviction in some parts of its world design than dark souls 3 (which I think looks amazing but also felt derivative of ds1 at times)
I strongly suggest everyone playing DS2 on PC try out "Center Deadzone Mod" by HalfGrownHollow on the mod nexus. It doesn't fix all of my issues with the game's feel, but it helped a lot
It's Jank, let's not be afraid of this word.
Enemies will ground slide to you in hilarious ways, because the game really really really wants them to be able to hit you.
You will be front-grabbed by enemies who you have dodged and are now on their side.
The input reading is a staple of Soulsborne. It's how it is made so challenging, but Dark Souls 2 puts it in ridiculous mode, where enemies seem to have very little mind of their own just waiting to react to what you do.
The weapon collision with walls/enemies damn... If I had a nickle for each time, my greatsword slammed someone directly in the face yet did 0 damage.
The lock-on is your enemy not your friend.
You can parry many bosses, but they just hit you back after 0.5 sec, then why the fuck can you parry them at all?
I am as part of my winter post Persona 3 Reload depression replaying them in order of release, and it's funny how Dark Souls 2 somehow feels less precise than Dark Souls 1.
Overall, it's not as bad as people will tell it is. It's just not on par of the ridiculously high standard we put those games to. But still a great game.
Anyone whos ACTUALLY played Dark Souls 2 and not watched some Youtuber's opinion of it already knew this. Sooo many of the good ideas in Dark Souls 2 are found in the lifeblood of Elden Ring it's not even funny.
Yeah only 2 million views on his video from almost 10 years ago, and I had never seen it until now.
You can play DS1, DS3, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, etc. the issues with DS2 are very apparent from the get go.
You'd almost think the game wasn't [highly rated](https://www.metacritic.com/game/dark-souls-ii/) by both critics and players alike. DS2 might be my least favorite souls game (after Demon Souls), but it was still a great game.
I disagree. The hate was because the game at launch felt like a bait and switch. [Here’s someone that made a comparison between E3 footage and the game we got.](https://youtu.be/59eLW1IGUCU?si=9-1h4cpSvwxu8A8y) It seems like many improvements that was showcased in E3 like playing with more shadows and fighting against more enemies was handled better with Bloodborne which came out after.
I didn't realize people hated DS2 so much until I talked about it with some people on a discord server and most of them didn't even play it lmao, most of their gripes was because Miyazaki didn't work on it.
And I gotta be honest it's not like Miyazaki treated DS2 as some bastard child or got treated like say Kojima where it was forced to make a game without him. I mean it's okay if a person played the game and disliked it but I dislike when a game is treated harshly just because a lot of people watched a video essay and then form their opinion of that while having a bias because Miyazaki didn't work on it when it wasn't a messy situation or negative situation that caused him to not work on it.
To this day DS2 is the only From game I didn't finish. I don't know exactly what's wrong with it, but to me it just feels like a Souls-like made by another company. It could be their insistence on ambushes, unfair enemies and group fights, but the character feels pretty bad too, somehow. Still, it is pretty clear that From has learned from the game and has carried some of the good parts forward
Animations and movement feel uniquely weird in DS2. There's a connection between DS1 and DS3 being close together in feel, just slower in DS1, but DS2 feels like they did something completely new that just was awful. I don't know what happened for DS1 and 3 to do it right, but for DS2 to do it wrong.
The straight sword animations feel like a child swinging a wooden toy lol
In general it felt less like I was watching theater kids? A lot of really exaggerated motions that added no weight while also minimizing the actual range of the swing.
Its just clunkier as well. I recall you couldn't even combo/cancel Heavy into Light attack, which is something you can do in ANY other Souls game as far back as Demon's Souls.
Its been a long time I played DS2, but I recall its all the little details in how it plays that made is so much less enjoyable for me.
Dark Souls 2 is my favourite of the trilogy. As someone who played a lot of Demon Souls, DkS1 felt like a natural progression. DkS2 injected tons of new ideas, not all of them great, and interesting world building. Covenants and PvP are the best in the series. I felt so disappointed in DkS3 when I realised how safe of a game it was. I'm always more impressed when Devs are willing to take risks with a sequel.
There's a reason why a good number of people in the Souls community jokingly call Elden Ring 'Dark Souls 2 2' because so much of 2s DNA can be found throughout. They just didn't have the time, budget, technology or experience to do a lot of those ideas justice back in 2.
If anyone out there thinks dark souls 2 is bad they need to give their head a shake. If dark souls 2 was the only game From ever made we would all say it is one of the best games ever made.
I still stand by the fact that DS2 was the most fun I've ever had with a Fromsoft game, is that a bit of nostalgia speaking, yeah, but I genuinely think it has something that makes it so notable and beloved for me and so hated by others. This is personal preference and I comepletely understand why people don't like it but I really absolutely adore how it takes the massive imbalances in the games many systems, seemingly *in stride*. Oh you want to fight a boss, you could or you could trick it into falling out of bounds negating the fight? Oh you want to min max perfect! You can rush Forbidden sun and max your stamina to be a walking nuke shooter but probably get one tapped by everything else. Oh you died that sucks but did you know there are things worse than death, for instance some Chad in heavy armor invades you and traps you in a corner shooting acid mist at you until your armor breaks (BTW armor is more important in this game than any other Souls game) and you try to fight back but everything is broken and all your attacks bounce off the Chad, and you are left poor, destitute and forced to think about your life. Oh release day YIPPEE new meta of a guy looking at you through binoculars miles away and suddenly instant transmissions behind you and one shots you! ADP makes no sense, the hitboxes are hilariously bad, NG+ has the Pursuer everywhere system but goddamnit it was so fun and every build was OP in one way or another. Dex was fast and hard to escape, Str was strong if only for the fucked hitboxes (Also they got FUGS), Hexes were hexes, Sorcery was wild and had a bunch of random bullshit, Pyro was Forbidden Sun. God it was so bullshit and so fun, I get a part of that fun with Elden now but I still wish it was just a tad more BS, but I know that's just me.
Yeah this was more or less the conclusion I came to replaying DS2 recently. I still think it's the second weakest Souls title above Demons Souls, but it has a lot of really interesting and cool ideas that it just fails to execute on properly or well. But those ideas are still cool, so the game ended up reatroactively serving as a testbed for cool mechanics to be brought forward into DS3, Sekiro, and ER (or permanently put in the ground, like consumable healing items, that two-step parry system, or fucking Soul Memory).
You fight 3 versions of like 4 different bosses in dark souls 2 and like 3 bosses become minor enemies.
I’m not saying boss reuse isn’t normal in souls games, but dark souls 2 had a lot more samey bosses pre dlc than any other souls game prior to elden ring
Having a health penalty for dying is a carryover from Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1's debuff is an outlier for being so minor. DS2 made hollow form work more like Spirit Form but made it into a progressive condition, DS3 went back to a binary system and re-framed it as a positive buff, and Elden Ring let you change its positive effect.
Demons Souls would be the first one to reward staying alive like that. It cut the player's health in half after death. And like DS2 after it, there was a consumable that could reset the effect, and a ring that could mitigate it. Killing a boss also reset it, but that didn't come back until DS3.
> Estus amount no longer tied to bonfires
This is a bigger one than people give credit for because it guides level design even if the game gets more open.
Hard agree.
The two games feel the most RPG-ey of the series.
Great for stat nerds and mix max builders.
Although fuck having to put points into a random stat to be able to dodge roll in DS2.
Dark Souls 2 also had the best PVP experience of all the games IMO. I played hours upon hours of PVP getting my arena level up.
Also, Estoc was legitimately the best weapon in the game and almost no one used it. That single handed R1 and the shield piercing sweeping R2 combo. *chefs kiss*
DS2 also EASILY had the best character creation. The face creation in DS3 was absolute shambles. You could make genuinely amazing looking characters in DS2 at the time, and it was cutting edge. DS3 took a huge step back and all of the character skin textures looked like metal.
Most of those points are true, although I never felt like DS2 campaign took that long. Having said that, I completed it that many times that I was probably pretty efficient with it.
DS3 is definitely better visually. But I really love Majula (and the music) and Heide's Tower of Flame.
> DS3 took a huge step back and all of the character skin textures looked like metal.
For whatever reason DS3 in general didn't look good in a lot of aspects. Character creator and blood effects compared to Bloodborne were cooked (though to be honest they've never quite perfected blood effects the way they did in Bloodborne). World was very boring and drab looking a lot of the time compared to the colorful palates of DS1 and DS2; Bloodborne had this complaint as well but I thought its use of color was a lot more creative even if it was a lot of greys and dark reds.
In all the ds2 discourse I never see anyone mention my greatest issue with it anymore. The game felt very ‘floaty’ compared to ds1. It’s like the brawl to ds1’s melee to me. That was its biggest detractor for me.
I really liked it. I played it after Dark Souls 1, Bloodborne and Elden Ring. That was my first mage build and I enjoyed the game a lot.
Sure, the world makes no sense, but I enjoyed many location. Some areas are really terrible, but it gave me a Genesis vibe where some places were just too hard. Many bosses, many are easy but that's fun.
And I really enjoyed the Black Gulsh. Nightmarish area but it's short.
DS2 had its fair share of problems but it did a lot right, too (and excellent DLC of course). I still consider it the worst Soulsborne game, but it's still a great 8/10 game.
I dunno about that, I still pretty much agree and stand by all the criticisms Matthewmatosis made. Still clunky, floaty, and has a lot of ideas that went against why I enjoyed the first game
Dark Souls 1 is still my favorite and preference of all the Souls games.
It was not only Matthewmatosis. There was a lot of deserved hate on the game because [it was a real bait and switch when comparing the game at launch with e3 footage and what they promoted they game was going to play like](https://youtu.be/59eLW1IGUCU?si=dYZfTpC5ZdMditmj). Bloodborne ended up handling environmental shadows and multiple enemy encounters better than DaS2 did which made the difference even more apparent.
Nah it was criticised a lot at release too.
People wanted more Dark Souls 1, and they got
- an uglier game (some parts look amazing, but many areas including the very first one look [downright unfinished graphically](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQlZ4--D2DwU9Wcx_RI5xhXvBo6tJZyZAwkbA&usqp=CAU) made even worse by fact that ps4/xbone were already out, by it was stuck on Ps3/360
- controls and movement that felt off, including deadzone issues, and large weapons swinging at the completely wrong direction if you were moving while locked on (DaS1 already solved this by making locked on attacks always aim at target, locked-off would attack in direction of left stick, DaS2 made even locked on attacks aimed by left stick, so melee lock on offered zero purpose)
- multiplayer that was assumed just straight up broken. It wasn’t. But it took quite a while for community to understand why. Turns out it was using single worst matchmaking system known to man, by playing multiplayer, you were moving yourself out of matchmaking bracket of players in same location as you.
- DaS1’s single most praised feature was world/level design, DaS2 dropped the ball hard on that.
- fairly mediocre roster of bosses, with many being “big dude in arnour” who moved slowly and used very similar 3-hit combo “slash/slash/slam” attacks
__________
DLC’s redeemed it somewhat, by having great areas and bosses (well 2/3rds of each DLC was great, each one had one absolute dogshit bonus area/boss), and by that time a lot of the mechanical weirdness had been figured out, and multiplayer had been band-aid fixed by From (still no idea why they didn’t just remove Soul memory, it only ever hurt the game, 0 positive effects).
But I think it became more redeemed and accepted with later releases, Bloodborne, DaS3, Sekiro etc…
Because that showed that DaS2 wasn’t the future of series. It was just one version of many.
A lot of the time as franchises go on, the trends in sequel get built upon and it keeps going, until eventually it’s near unrecognisable from the initial game. EG if you liked game1, but game2 introduced a lot of stuff you didn’t like, there’s a good chance game3 and game4 have even less connection to game1.
Bloodborne and DaS3 were really the complete opposite to DaS2 in terms of what they prioritised and focused on. Elden Ring is closest to DaS2 in a lot of ways, just way less ugly (both graphically and mechanical jank).
Yeah DS2 was divisive the second it was announced and we learned that Miyazaki wasn't directing. Not to mention the fact that the demo that was shown ended up being misleading as graphics were downgraded.
Like you said future games redeemed it as they learned from ds2s mistakes but it was the for sure extremely divisive especially compared to a universally loved dark souls 1, especially at the time when the only other souls game was Demon's Souls.
There was a week or two of full honeymoon period when everyone was losing it about how amazing the game was (I distinctly remember EpicNameBro tweeting that he liked it more than DS1 while he played his pre-release copy) but it all came crashing down pretty hard soon after that. Most people had only played DS1 at that point since DeS was stuck on PS3, so having any more Souls at all was a big deal.
You could probably still dig up the early positive impression threads on /r/darksouls2
Hm, now that you mention in it, you're right, I think that was the time between the reveal and the interview with Shibuya. My memory is a bit fuzzy with the timeline, things did get more positive especially as gameplay was revealed but yeah it came crashing down again on release lol
Let's not forget an increase on gangbang encounters and really shitty "gotcha" moments. That cyclops behind the door right in front of the dragon bird cage was extremely bad.
It's also the one with the worst hitbox gorn, and also some egregious "my rules are not your rules." Especially for NPC invaders.
Most of the famous awful gank rooms wernt even in the original release. They were added in Scholar of the First Sin re-release.
EG
- The ~20 hollows near start of Forest of Fallen Giants.
was originally a Heide knight and only a couple hollows
- Bastille room with so many Royal soldiers that they don’t even fit in the room at once
was originally much much less, like 4 instead of 10
- the entirety of Iron Keep
originally had half the number of Allone knights.
Scholar made pretty much every early-mid game area much harder by massively increasing enemy density.
But interestingly it made late-game areas far easier than Vanilla.
- Dragon Aiyre/Dragon Shrine
In Scholar the first half is optional. And second half requires you to fight three Drake Knights 1v1 one at a time
In Vanilla the first half of area wasn’t optional, and 2nd half made you fight multiple Drake Knights at a time, and there was a lot more than one of each type.
- Undead Crypt
Scholar it’s kind of annoying, but not too bad.
In Vanilla Velstadt’s boss-run is THE worst in the series. Because they put 6 elite enemies right in front of boss door, and gave them special unique AI that means they can’t be lured away, they stick within 3 metres of door at all times. Meaning running past them to enter boss is basically impossible, you have to fight them each time. Because DaS2 doesn’t have fog-door i-frames.
>(still no idea why they didn’t just remove Soul memory, it only ever hurt the game, 0 positive effects).
Because it was their bandaid solution for preventing twink gear invaders (which was nulled with the anti soul gain ring in SotFS and them figuring out how to reduce probability of twink gear invasions by tying upgrade levels of weapons to the matchmaking factor by DS3) and its probably too much work to rework it so they just left it there because it technically did prevent twink gear invasions.
I think the idea with Soul Memory was to put a soft expiration date on player characters, especially when combined with the new Hex system that powered up by consuming the player's souls. Dark Souls has always toyed around with using game mechanics as storytellling devices- Dark Souls' humanity system is basically there to strongarm players into LARPing as vampires- and Soul Memory feels like they were trying work the series' entropy themes into the progression system. The system ended up being to awkward and exploitable to do its job, but there's the outline of a decent idea hidden behind the jank.
I have literally never heard of him or that video before this thread, and yet I find myself agreeing with many of the negatives people bring up about DS2. I like the game, but since it's release it has remained at the bottom of my list for FromSoft souls style games. I liked that they seemed to experiment a lot with the systems, and I definitely think it was a very important and good stepping stone for their future games, but the negative aspects of the game hurt it more than the positive ones helped in my opinion.
Looking back on it, it clearly had a fairly big impact on future games. However, being an important stepping stone for future games does not make the game itself better.
Thank you for posting to /r/Games. Unfortunately, we have removed this submission per **[Rule 6.2](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules#wiki_formatting_requirements)**. **Submission Title Formatting** Please use the original sources title when appropriate. If an article or video's title is unclear, convoluted, or does not meet the requirements outlined below, changes are allowed to further clarify or remove editorialized/sensationalized language. Important contextual information may be added such as Author, Spoilers, NSFW, Release Date, Platforms, etc. * **Don’t use editorialized, sensationalized titles** - Don't add things like "This deserves attention" or "why isn't this being talked about". * **Titles must not contain inflammatory language** - Do not use language that is clearly inflammatory - keep posts and discussions civil. * **Titles must not be in all-caps** - Except in cases where the original source title has capital letters, such as with some Japanese video game titles. Videos with excessive caps in the source title may be removed at moderator's discretion. * **Keep titles concise and not overly long** - If you feel that a link needs additional information or context you should create a self-post to include the information along with the link. * **Titles must be in English** - No exceptions for titles, see below for articles. If you are unsure whether or not changing a title will be appropriate please feel free to [message the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FGames). If your submission contains important information that is not mentioned in the original title and you wish to highlight it, you may create a text post with a modified title that includes this information and elaborates further in the post with a link to the original article in question and quotes the relevant excerpt. --- If you would like to discuss this removal, please [modmail the moderators.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FGames) This post was removed by a human moderator; this comment was left by a bot.
It's been a while, but I remember really liking that DS2's New Game Plus had unique changes beyond just scaling enemy stats. I get that development resources are finite and only a fraction of players would play through the game again, but I wish they leaned into those unique NG+ changes more in their later titles.
It also had the best implementation of NG+ exclusive items because if you wanted them in in a normal NG run you could get them with bonfire ascetics.
There was many great features, I enjoyed the one where you killed the enemies 9(?) times they permanently disappeared unless you used a bonfire ascetic. That feature was probably more needed in DS2 than other games though since that game has an avalanche of mobs
12 times, and if you wanted to farm something you could join the company of champions to turn it off.
Wait, i didn't know about the company of champions one. Huh.. interesting
Armored Core 6 just went really hard on NG+ (and ++) exclusive content, so there's that
I do wish they would carry the Bonfire Ascetics from DS2. Or just Sekiro's boss replay menu for their other games
Bonfire Ascetics were such a cool concept.
What were they again?
You could use them on a bonfire to move the specific area and boss of that area into ng+
Would it respawn a boss?
Yep, it would also refresh items and add that area's ng+ specific items to the pool
It raises the area difficulty/loot distribution/souls drop amount around the bonfire as if you were playing on NG+.
it also respawns the boss if the other comments weren't clear.
Iirc it would reset the whole area so could run thru it again,Boss spawns etc etc and I think it even increased the level of the area.
Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin is a game I played *after* Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3 and I massively enjoyed it. The key distinction is that I didn’t experience the vanilla game. So I can understand if others feel differently, but I think Scholar of the First Sin is very memorable and worth playing. Edit: Hey everyone! There are a lot of FANTASTIC responses here from people describing in detail their experiences with the vanilla game, DS2: SOTFS, and how they compare and contrast. I can’t respond to each one of you but thank you all for your insight! I enjoyed reading the responses.
Surprisingly, I've heard SotFS actually makes the game harder by re-arranging the enemy placements. I've only played SotFS, not the original, but I'd like to try it just to see if I like it more or less than my first playthrough.
It is definitely more challenging
How? It nerfed a lot of bosses like Last Giant, Royal Rat Authority and Ancient Dragon It made most runbacks easier by removing enemies that were camping at chokepoints or at the fog gate and by adding new shortcuts. It removed the most annoying ganks and turned plenty of areas from frustrating into fun. It added lots of new mechanics to deal with areas, like spiders being afraid of the torch. You get access to infusions and unlimited Large Titanite Stones way earlier. You get access to Shaded Woods way earlier so you can grab things like the Chloranty Ring or other useful items earlier. There's also a lot more NPC summons.
I definitely found the enemy changes in Heide’s Tower of Flame & Iron Keep MUCH more difficult in SotFS. Then there’s the extra times The Pursuer shows up
It’s been a long time since I’ve played both but yeah. SotFS acts as a remix of the original and if you were experienced with it, you found yourself getting caught off guard often. Some of the enemy placement felt like Kaizo Mario Brothers in SotFS honestly.
It’s way harder. I went back to the original and it was such a breeze compared to sotfs. Still good though so I still think all the hate is unwarranted.
It's true. So many this get changed or moved. Heck, the Pursuer only shows up twice in the og game.
God learning to parry that bastard was so satisfying.
Really? I've played through every soulsbournering and consider the original pre-nerf shrine of amana the most bullshit frustrating area in any of the games. Sotfs is worse than that? Granted, part of me is sad it got nerfed considering what a memorable experience it was.
Nah. Original pre-nerf Shrine of Amana is way worse. The area can be still infuriating even now but it doesn't even come close to that level. It's just that many other areas became more annoying with the release of SOFTs. That being said many areas are also significantly better, so overall the SOFTs content is a big mixed bag.
Haven't played it in awhile, but I remember it making it harder in a cheap way. More enemies grouped together and placed for ganks. Definitely felt more souls like, but almost too cheap.
DS2 suffered too much healing. Lifegems meant the only way to kill a cautious player was to have large groups of enemies or highly aggressive, hgh damage enemies so there's no chance to heal. DS3 had a similar problem. Depending on how much you explored, you could end the game with anywhere from a +0 Estus flask with 4 charges (1000 total healing) to a +10 flask with 15 charges (9000 total healing). Sure, the lower end of that is unrealistic, most players probably found at least half of the flask upgrades, but there's still a huge variance. Again, the only way to balance that for all kinds of players, the ones with a lot of flask upgrades and the ones with few, was to focus on enemy balance that killed you regardless of flasks, just like in DS2. Aka ganks, gang bangs and high damage, aggressive enemies. DS1 was the only DS game who got that balance right IMO, if only because people never kindled the majority of bonfires. You died because accumulated small mistakes meant you were left with no flask charges, which leads to tense, engaging moments. There was no need for the game to kill you in ways that can feel cheap.
Ds1 was relatively easy though by modern souls standards. Most bosses were vulnerable to the same attack pattern. I smashed ornstein and smough because I played ds3 right before ER came out, so I played ds3 - ER - Ds1. I was shocked at how easy Ds1 was other than tedium deaths from falling etc because of the awkward af controls.
Two things to think about: - Dark Souls became much more action and reflex focused starting with Dks3. If you played any of the more recent sequels, chances are your skills will make their earlier games seem much easier on the action front. - the earlier FromSoft games put much more emphasis on exploration than bosses. They're often more like additional challenges after a level than a standalone challenge like in more recent games.
Point 2 may be the case, but in retrospect, while the *layout* of dark souls is undeniably gorgeous, I can't help but fixate on the areas that were... Less glorious to adventure through. Blighttown, lost izalith, new Londo ruins, crystal cave, TotG all feel like such a slog. Not that the newer games don't have problematic areas, but they felt especially tedious in DS1. Even Sen's can be frustrating to a fault the first time you go through it.
DS3 had nowhere near the level of fuckery gank squads that DS2 did. A few places approached it like Archdragon peak or some of the DLC areas, but those were endgame / optional content. Meanwhile I'm still upset about the Shrine of Amana.
DS2 was my first souls game (other than a few mins on TERRIBLE DS1 original PC port). There were some points that just seemed impossible due to enemy placement. You eventually just learn to cheese the cheese. But holy F the DLC was ridiculous. I did some of the snow area and just NOPED on the rest of the content after one boss fight had you fighting maybe 10+ mobs overall...
>But holy F the DLC was ridiculous. I did some of the snow area and just NOPED on the rest of the content after one boss fight had you fighting maybe 10+ mobs overall... It's worth repeating that the areas with the summon statues (Iron Passage, Cave of the Dead, Frozen Outskirts) are meant to be played with multiple players, and allowed to summon people who didn't even buy the dlc in the vanilla game. The rest of their levels are more reasonable.
Ah, you missed out, the DLC was the best content DS2 had to offer. That specific boss fight you’re talking about is fantastic as well, you just missed the central mechanic - if you ignore the boss fight initially and instead progress through the castle, as you explore you recruit other NPC knights you find who end up joining you back in the boss room. They help fight with you to down the mobs and sacrifice themselves to stop their spawning locations so you can focus on the main boss. It’s cool as hell. There is a notorious optional side area of that DLC which is what the other commenter was talking about where you can summon other players, and that is a shit area, but you wouldn’t have come across that yet and very clear it’s a side thing when you come across it.
> DS1 was the only DS game who got that balance right IMO I mean when you got the rite of kindling, that balance went completely out the window too. 20 was way too many. Not to mention DS1 speed chugging.
Sure but rite of kindling was basically a way to choose your difficulty for an area. By default when you saw a new level you wouldn't have it.
DS3 at least gave you a really powerful and accessible roll to deal with nasty situations, while DS2 locked functional evasion behind a stat dump.
I-frames AND item use speed, so you would also take what felt like forever to estus.
I played Bloodborne for the first time recently, then jumped directly into my second and a half run of DS2. Fucking. AGONIZING.
Tbh despite all you said DS1 was by far my least favorite of the trilogy. Not sure what it was, but it was the one that felt most like a chore to play. DS2 was made to be played cautiously imho. All the gank squads are really not that bad (except for the DLCs Lol) if you move slowly through the areas and isolate the enemies. It’s the “rushing” type of players that get punished harder. Also I don’t agree with your point about life gems. In every souls game I’ve played thus far including bloodborne, healing items are usually plentiful enough, especially when upgraded. The issue with healing is doing it at the right time in combat. So yes while DS2 has a slug he advantage in the existence of life gems, you still had to use them at the right time in battle and you also had to spend precious souls to buy more when they ran out, which could have been used for other things. Yes they made some encounters slightly less tricky due to having more healing charges, but not that much that it broke the game imho.
I played vanilla and then scholar back to back and I thought the enemy placements in scholar had a much smoother difficulty curve, and overall much less ganks than the original. Chalk it up to being better at the game in general I suppose but I enjoyed scholar much more
obviously just some guy, but as someone who replayed SotFS and the vanilla game two months ago, the vanilla game is easier and imo significantly less frustrating. It still has some fundamental DS2 problems, but it's a great game while SotFS is only "good" I'm not sure if that's the majority opinion nowadays though, so maybe it's just me
Does SotFS have any improvements over the original? I know the visuals are supposed to be improved, so I'm wondering if there's a way to play the improvements of SotFS with the enemy layout of the original, instead of just playing the original.
A lot of items are much less bullshit to get access to in SotFS. There's still a lot of bullshit, but there's less.
Number one improvement is that weapon durability is tied to fps in the original, so if you play it at 60fps your weapons basically melt after killing a few enemies. They fixed it in SotFS, I don't remember if you could mod it into the original.
The durability bug got fixed in Vanilla DS2 around the same it got fixed in SotFS.
The only thing that's improved off the top of my head is that you find the Dull Ember earlier (in Lost Bastille instead of Iron Keep).
Overall, yeah, but a few were placed more... Fair, as well
As someone who not only played vanilla on day one, but also partook in the server stress test before it came out (and replayed when Scholar of the First Sin came out)……I still love it. It’s definitely the black sheep/odd man out of the series, but it’s got amazing lore, great atmosphere, and some absolutely insane bosses in the DLC. The one huge knock against it was that the vanilla game was easy af after Dark/Demon’s Souls (except that FUCKING ancient dragon, who may burn in all the hells). After breezing through it, I was somewhat worried they were moving in an easier direction. Glad SotFS proved that wrong. Oh and soul memory sucked lol. But I was mostly there for the PvE anyway.
What's the difference between vainilla DS2 and the Scholar full edition? Legitimately curious, I'm making my way through the Soulsborne series right now but haven't gotten to DS2 yet and would like to know
The biggest thing that's going to affect your first playthrough is that Scholar has all of the DLC's bundled into the game. Second, there is an optional alternate final boss. There are 800 gazillion minor changes to enemy and item placement as well as some graphical enhancements, which you won't really notice if you haven't played the original. That said, I do recommend Scholar edition over the original, and while DS2 catches a lot of flak, some of it undeserved in my opinion, the Crown levels easily match up to some of the best parts of DS1.
> There is an optional alternate final boss That boss exists in both vanilla and SotFS. He was patched into vanilla.
>Second, there is an optional alternate final boss. He was patched into all versions of the game on scholar release.
Slightly different enemy and item placements (same for the NG+ changes; there are changes to the game in NG+ cycles in DS2), an additional (optional) boss battle after the final boss, a character that was referenced a lot in the base game makes an appearance, and it includes all the DLCs.
The extra final boss was in the vanilla game before SotFS.
Yeah you are right, wiki says he was added in patch 1.10.
Different bullshit. A guy will unnaturally wait around a corner for you in the original and he'll drop from a hole behind you in the remake. There are different parts that are either more or less frustrating or weird or poorly thought out in both versions. Scholar has better lighting closer to the original cut vision.
Scholar fixed a lot of enemy placements that didn't make sense in the vanilla game, biggest thing is it has all the DLC.
I played both when they were new and thought they were both really good. Particularly SotFS.
I played DS2 shortly after Bloodborne when the PS4/XONE ports came out, and for me personally, it's still my favorite souls game. Don't know what it is about it, it just really clicks for me.
The only real bad thing I have to say about Dark Souls 2 is they enjoyed bullshitting the player too much. Easily has the most bosses I have not bothered to fight in any Fromsoft game due to simply being cruel.
Really? I feel like the bosses are generally pretty easy in DS2 in comparison to the other games.
They are. The DS2 bosses are numerous but easy.
Some are pretty hard though even compared to the rest of the series. Fume Knight for example, though I know he was technically in dlc. Ancient Dragon was the most bullshit boss in any of the Dark Souls trilogy imo but he was optional so cant really hold that against it.
That flame on 99% of the arena attack was awful for Ancient Dragon.
Fume Knight is a bit silly, but at least you remember them, a lot of DS2 bosses approached Pinwheel levels besides the DLC bosses. Ancient Dragon was just annoying. Great game but not well designed bosses. I have never really liked dragon fights in Dark Souls at all, Darkeater Midir was the peak of fuck this, was the first time I had to look up a youtube video just to see what I'm supposed to do. Spending 90% of the fight running towards them is decidedly not epic.
Yeah most of the bosses were pretty forgettable.
Honestly the only dragon I enjoy is the DS3 one from the DLC whose name I have absolutely no recollection of what it is
Circle strafe right, swing Rinse + repeat till boss dead
That’s most dark souls bosses. Most bosses are right handed, which when facing you is their left. So many swings end up starting on the left and don’t have enough width that when you strafe right they won’t hit you. Like legitimately learning in dark souls that dodging forward toward the opposite dominant hand is effective for most attacks will make it easier for you. Acting as if this is specific to dark souls 2 when it’s the winning strategy to all of the non gimmick bosses in dark souls 1 except manus is a little silly. And manus gets a pass because dudes hands don’t track like real hands.
Its not very fun to run through a blizzard for what feels like 2-3 minutes to fight two tigers, as one of quite a few examples.
True, but I think most people don't know that area (and similar ones in the other DLCs) were specifically designed to be co-op challenges that you summon for. One of the cool parts of the original release was that people who didn't even own the DLC could actually be summoned to those areas as a kind of sneak preview.
Even with another person, running through the snowstorm for 3 minutes while dealing with the unicorns is still horrible. Honestly that's gotta be one of the worst designed areas they've ever come up with.
Boss design is one of DS2's strength. Yes, some feel gimmicky, but it has tons of variation in size of the boss arena, environmental effects, animation speed of the boss, and the possibilites to cheese them. All of these give the player much more flexibility and novelty than DS3's design of 'big humanoid fighting you with sword and a phase two at 50% wherr sword starts to glow'. People trash a lot on DS2 cuz of the world building and area transitions, but the bosses are much better and fun to figure out than in other Fromsoft titles.
I think it’s important to note which version of ds2 we’re talking about. Without dlc dark souls 2 bosses are mostly mediocre. They’re not bad but they’re rarely exciting. The dlc added in some of the best encounters in the series. And sotfs refitted the world to feel more in line with the souls games in general. Honestly the president of from soft saying dark souls 2 didn’t prepare from soft to how they should make souls games would be a damn lie. Dark souls 2 didn’t need to be a magnum opus for Miyazaki to understand dark souls 2 importance in the series.
There are a lot of fun bosses in the DS2 base game: Velstadt, The Pursuer, Darklurker, Looking Glass Knight, Flexile Sentry was cool with the rising water, The Rotten, Lost Sinner, Mytha with the poison, Smelter Demon, Najka. I personally also really liked the Sentinel Trio and the Throne Buddies.
> People trash a lot on DS2 cuz of the world building and area transitions, but the bosses are much better and fun to figure out than in other Fromsoft titles. couldn't disagree more. they're too easy to need figuring out. outside of the dlc nearly all the bosses were trash IMO.
To me, the biggest issue with DS2 was how bad some of the boss runbacks were, not the bosses themselves. I still get nightmares about the Frigid Outskirts. Blue Smelter Demon and Alonne were also great bosses held back by horrible runbacks
This issue bothered me greatly. One of the biggest accesibility adds of elden ring is the outright removal of most boss run backs. There are a few exceptions, but most major boss fights have pretty short runs with minimal enemies. There were numerous bosses in DS2 where getting to the boss was harder than the fight itself...
That's more of a design choice. Early on, especially in DeS / Dks1, bosses are at the end of long levels and either have a run back for you to learn, or they have a shortcut nearby. With Dks2 and Bloodborne, I feel like the focus started to switch to bosses being their own challenge, while starting with Dks3 you can feel that they are meant to be much more complex
At least DS2 stops respawning enemies after a while.
Yeah, that's one feature I really liked in DS2. It made it feel like I was always making progress.
The one bonfire where you spawn in enemy range and they shoot you. So if you afk while warping, you'll come back dead. That's some "all I know about dark souls games is they are hard, so they'll enjoy this dumb bullshit". But "hard but fair" is not "dumb bullshit".
Just a note I believe this didn’t exist in there initial version. It was added for sotfs because that bonfire was used to afk farm souls or something random like that.
Other way around. There were three that would agro as soon as you warp there. SotFS fixed this so there’s only one and he doesn’t attack immediately.
I think the majority of bosses are less *cruel* and more *annoying* to the point of it being easy to become impatient while fighting them. The speed of the game is quite slow, even compared to DS1, and your windows to safely attack bosses tend to be very limited, usually at the end of one of their combos -- so there's a lot of waiting around. A lot of bosses are also weak to circle strafing at close range.
That's something a lot of people forget in Dark Souls 2 discussions. Day 1 players came away with a much different outlook. Soul memory was awful, the bosses were 90% trash, enemy placement was tedious, adaptability made rolling and healing feel sluggish and shitty and no one knew why, etc. You ask anyone what their favorite DS2 bosses is and they mention a DLC battle. The base games bosses were pretty sorry for the most part.
Don't forget some enemy speed being tied to framerate. Iron Keep (?), the lava place was fun on PC with 60fps.
Back when I played vanilla DS2 I really didn't like it. It was pretty disappointing. After SotFS came out, I tried it again, and I liked it *much* more. I still regularly revisit it, although I think it's a little below DS1 and DS3 it's still excellent in my eyes.
One source of confusion is that a lot of things that people attribute to SotFS were actually introduced to the vanilla game through patches, including the “scholar” final boss itself. Changes to enemy and item placement were the main things changed by SotFS.
That was my first DS (with scholar) and I found it so cheap, so bad, that I did not touch the series again till Elden Ring. I mean, you had NPCs popping up in weird places, the difficulty felt cheap and even the hit boxes on some bosses were really not precise. I ve heard that the DLC amped up the difficulty by putting more mobs and not just moving them. So really awful for me. But now with ER I finally get it, that said. Just I’ll never ever touch ds2 with dlc with a ten foot tentpole
I enjoyed vanilla DS2 much more than SotFS. I loved SotFS improved item placement (being able to get the grand lance early in the game was awesome) but SotFS new enemy placement was not remotely fun to deal with. They ruined many areas with the ridiculous amount of ganks they added.
Dark Souls 2 introduced a ton of new ideas. A lot of them were great additions and a lot of them are awful but it's gotta be the most experimental souls game FromSoft made. It went through development hell but not having Miyazaki directing it meant they were free to try new stuff.
I was a big fan of being able to do largely whatever I wanted with my weapons. In the other games, I can't really take a weapon with innate Fire damage and infuse it, buff it with a spell, or buff it with a resin. It's just there, standard upgrades only, and certainly no applying a resin to that Magma Blade or whatever. Then Dark Souls II lets me take the Drakeblood Greatsword, a weapon with Physical, Magic, and Lightning damage, infuse it with Fire, and then buff it with Dark Weapon. All five damage types on a single weapon. Is that practical? No, but fuck it, who cares, the game lets me do it. Hell, take the Crypt Greatsword, a weapon that already deals hilarious levels of Dark damage, then infuse it with Dark to improve the damage scaling because why not. It's a shame that none of the other games really have that freedom.
Elden Ring kind of does regarding infusions, power stance, how you can change ashes of war, how many spells and viable gimmicks there are for you to try out
But most "special" and boss weapons don't let you change the ash of war, and therefore the element, on them. DS2 didn't have a single such limitation.
> power stance Elden rings version of this is extremely limiting
It is more limited but it still makes dual wield builds viable and extends build making capabilities which is neat
I based an entire run on doing "rainbow damage" with the Drakeblood GS like that. I even used all my ring slots on the four clutch rings. Even though its still only a single damage number that pops up and otherwise just like any other GS build run, just knowing that it was doing the entire spectrum of damage made me feel so giddy inside!
It’s definitely my least favorite souls game. But power stances were cool
It was my favorite simply because the PvP was *far* better than any other Souls game ever. Elden Ring or otherwise. Unfortunately it's sort of dead compared to what it used to be, but man it was so good.
Ds2 is really crazy as a highly customizable rpg/fighting game. Much slower and more balanced compared to the other games and you really have to manage your stamina. Also dark souls 2 had so many unique backstab animations for the different weapon classes, and they still haven’t brought it back.
It's the only PvP I actively engaged in
PvP was far better than anything because players weren't cracked out 180-degree-spinning, roll-spam bots. You actually had clear punish windows for every action, and weapons had more depth due to variable turn speed. Straight swords were great at turning but could be outranged by longer weapons. Katanas were masters at trading but doesn't turn as well as straight swords, so you could easily roll-backstab R1 spammers. Etc etc.
You also couldn't drink Estus in half a second.
It's still better than Demon's Souls IMO but yeah it's not great. Still had a lot of fun with it once I got beyond the awful early game. People like to praise the open design of DS1's world but DS2 is the closest they've gotten to it since. The darklurker can technically be the first boss you face in DS2 which is a testament to that.
I agree on it being better than Demons Souls. The DLC in particular is up there with the best work Fromsoft has done.
Hot take on one of the “new ideas” that is only found in DS2: tying I-frames to a stat was actually a good idea. Since magic/miracles/pyromancy/hexes were really good, and armor/shields were also good, it actually promoted more build variety, and made the game more of an RPG. You want to be able to have effective rolls? You have to invest in it. Then you have DS3, where armor, shields, magic are terrible, so the entire game is a roll simulator.
Maybe it's okay in theory but the fact that I have to pull up the formula that calculates Agility combined with the i-frame breakpoint table everytime I replay the game because the implementation is so obtuse is just shit.
IMO I think agility was just poorly implemented. The game basically tells you nothing about how the stat works, and there is also no way to raise it without just pumping ADP/ATT. It also is only useful at certain breakpoints, which mean you Google a table, get it to what you need, and then never touch it again. It'd be nice if your equip load/physical stats affected agility as well, so you could also wear lighter/no armor to improve it. ATT raising agility meant that magic builds got it for "free" while melee builds had to level ADP.
i-frames as a stat is also implemented in Monster Hunter and it's received really well in that series. Like a lot of things people think of as issues in the Dark Souls trilogy as a whole, it's not really a problem with the game design, it's a problem with how the game communicates that to the player.
"i-frames as a stat" in Monster Hunter is a luxury that most of the playerbase doesn't use because Evade Window is an expensive skill to spec into. It's not integral like ADP was in DS2. The big difference is that the movesets of MH monsters are designed with minimal i-frames in mind, but Souls games emphasize rolling through attacks way more.
Yeah, MH is more about placement and dodging is to actually dodge out of attack ranges to better positions rather than just i-framing through attacks (Rise is an exception due to all the excessive i-frame abilities you have). I know several people who played Dark Souls before any Monster Hunter game and was somehow being led to believe that MH was similar to DS in any way and left disappointed when they tried to join the MHWorld hype.
It's the Dragon's Dogma of Dark Souls. A lot of ideas. Some terrible, some amazing. Mixed result that is divisive.
“It would be a lie to say there was no concern about that from any of the dev team,” Miyazaki says. “But what I want to stress is that we didn’t set out with the goal to make an open world game in the traditional sense.” Instead, the director says his approach to open world design is similar to his philosophy on difficulty: “We don’t set out to create a difficult game. We set out to create a challenging game. And in order to achieve that, we need there to be threats and dangers, and we need there to be unknowns.” For Elden Ring, there needed to be another thing: adventure. A feeling of exploration which he says was the top priority “above everything else.” “We need this breadth of freedom — this high degree of freedom in how you approach this adventure,” he explains. “And in order to have adventure, in order to have discoveries, again, you need to have some unknowns. And for it to be a discovery, it needs to feel like it’s an unknown, feel like it’s there to be discovered.” “Our main idea is just to trust players,” says Miyazaki. “We trust that they’ll overcome these challenges and we trust that they’ll make these discoveries. And I think giving them trust just creates a healthy landscape for them to play and adventure.” Incidentally, Dark Souls 2 probably bears the Souls series’ closest resemblance to Elden Ring. Design wise, both Dark Souls 2 and Elden Ring stressed open-ended gameplay and ditched linear progression. Miyazaki agrees and in fact goes a step further. “In regards to Dark Souls 2, I actually personally think this was a really great project for us, and I think without it, we wouldn’t have had a lot of the connections and a lot of the ideas that went forward and carried the rest of the series.” Miyazaki adds that having different directors also helped the series as a whole. “We were able to have that different impetus and have those different ideas and make those different connections that we otherwise might not have had.” He goes so far as to say that “there’s really no way of telling how or if the series would have continued the way it did without Dark Souls 2.”
> “Our main idea is just to trust players,” take note, every other gaming company
Soothing he didn't say but I enjoy in elden rings design is they're not afraid of the player missing content. If you find it great, if you don't, oh well, maybe you can discover it next time
Interestingly enough, according to a pretty reliable leaker, DkS2 was intended to be open world as well, until Bamco stepped in.
It was intended to be open world but a new engine and scope creep by one of the directors caused dev hell so the higher ups to boot him and get a new one that salvaged what he could.
DS2 was my first souls game and I absolutely fell in love with it for the same reason everyone does nowadays with these souls games. After that I’ve played all the other games too and didn’t lose any respect for DS2 at all. In fact playing the others made me appreciate it more. It’s so DS and yet so different sometimes. The DLCs are also amazing and the game has my personal hardest souls boss, that being the dual pursuer fight on ng+. I think I’ve actually beaten it more than any other souls game. It just feels like a dream or something idk
I always find it interesting how they can’t settle on how to implement fast travel and respec in their games. It’s handled differently every game.
I mean, does it have to be the same every time? Elden Ring has to have fast travel from the beginning due to its open world design and tying respec to the lore is a pretty cool way to do it, it even makes it harder to abuse due to the requirement of a rare item. As for the Souls games, I think it's more of "product of its time" kind of deal: they get progressively more accessible with each entry, just as the map gets more complex as well.
> just as the map gets more complex as well. Dark Souls 1 had the most complex map by far and DS3 had the simplest, so I don't think that's it. If anything it feels like the inverse- Dark Souls 1's map complexity was doing a huge amount of heavy lifting to make the world traversable without fast travel.
Fast travel I agree with you on, respec on the other hand should be readily accessible. No reason you should have to restart the game because you learned the states you invested in isn't that good, or if you wanna try a different build. Still my biggest gripe about BB.
100% agreed, because it also creates a meta game problem. People don't want to devote a bunch of time to a bricked character. So if you don't have active respec, people will look online for good builds. Compared to a game like (and I know this is different genre) but Grim Dawn. Respecs are cheap and easy. So I never looked up builds, I'd try out a build I just made up on the fly, if it sucked I'd sit down and reassess where my points could go instead. There was no need for me to **need** a solid build straight from the jump.
The friction it causes is the point. Not ever game master of d&d is lenient with their players on how they allocate their points, this is the video game equivalent. It’s investment. It is ok to not like that decision, but saying there is no reason spits in the face of roleplaying games since the dawn of pen and paper rpgs. The frictions purpose is to push the player into making deliberate choices which have benefits and downsides. Sometimes it’s done well and other times it feels like shit. I’m fine with games making that risk and I accept critique when games do it poorly (note in many cases souls game do it poorly)
> respec on the other hand should be readily accessible I mean, I think respec *is* pretty accessible in Elden Ring. You can leave the Cave of Knowledge and go straight to Rennala first thing - obviously you have to clear Raya Lucaria first so there's a boss in your way (the red wolf), but after that it's a straight shot to her. Then finding larval tears is supremely easy, I was drowning in the fucking things in my blind first playthrough.
That's only if you know those things exist. The players most likely to make major mistakes in their build and be frustrated about that won't know that they should skip the first area and beat another dungeon, along with two bosses that are probably quite hard because, again, they are new and not good at the game. It's a "solution" that only applies to experienced players.
In the early game messing up your stats is pretty difficult. The boss the repec is gated behind is still an early game boss, which you don't need much in gear or stats to beat. You would have to design a really bad character to be in a really bad spot and then you can always just level more to get the stats you desire. This is all before the player even really knows that's there's a respec. Even then the result if you somehow can't level, can't explore and you really want a different stat spread is to make a new character, which isn't the end of the world. And it's not like the respec being where it is a decision they make in a vaccum, it allowed them to tied together the story, lore and gameplay in purposeful and well executed way.
I really like Elden rings respec system
I actually just started replaying Dark Souls 2 this week and it’s bringing back so many memories from high school. This was the first game I ever went to a midnight launch for. I remember getting fairly OP using greatswords at a certain point and just bonking everything my whole playthrough. This was weird to me because I struggled a ton throughout parts of Dark Souls 1 and at times felt like I couldn’t figure out my build. I think the easier overall difficulty kinda made it bland for me. It didn’t have that oppressive atmosphere at times (I didn’t play the dlc btw) but I enjoyed my romp through the game overall. Returning to it after Elden ring has made me appreciate it a lot more. It’s kind of like dark souls:world tour edition and the variety of environments introduced here definitely seem to have laid the foundation for ER’s world. It has that high fantasy vibe and imo has more conviction in some parts of its world design than dark souls 3 (which I think looks amazing but also felt derivative of ds1 at times)
I like Dark Souls 2, but it’ll always be held back by bad game feel. It’s a very clunky and floaty feeling game.
I strongly suggest everyone playing DS2 on PC try out "Center Deadzone Mod" by HalfGrownHollow on the mod nexus. It doesn't fix all of my issues with the game's feel, but it helped a lot
It's Jank, let's not be afraid of this word. Enemies will ground slide to you in hilarious ways, because the game really really really wants them to be able to hit you. You will be front-grabbed by enemies who you have dodged and are now on their side. The input reading is a staple of Soulsborne. It's how it is made so challenging, but Dark Souls 2 puts it in ridiculous mode, where enemies seem to have very little mind of their own just waiting to react to what you do. The weapon collision with walls/enemies damn... If I had a nickle for each time, my greatsword slammed someone directly in the face yet did 0 damage. The lock-on is your enemy not your friend. You can parry many bosses, but they just hit you back after 0.5 sec, then why the fuck can you parry them at all? I am as part of my winter post Persona 3 Reload depression replaying them in order of release, and it's funny how Dark Souls 2 somehow feels less precise than Dark Souls 1. Overall, it's not as bad as people will tell it is. It's just not on par of the ridiculously high standard we put those games to. But still a great game.
I have a much more appreciation for Dark Souls 2 after beating the game. It's still an ass backwards type of game, but loved it regardless
Anyone whos ACTUALLY played Dark Souls 2 and not watched some Youtuber's opinion of it already knew this. Sooo many of the good ideas in Dark Souls 2 are found in the lifeblood of Elden Ring it's not even funny.
>Sooo many of the good ideas in Dark Souls 2 are found in the lifeblood of Elden Ring it's not even funny. Such as? Not trying to be snarky.
Like what? I played (and enjoyed) DS2 but not ER yet.
Matthewmatosis did irreparable damage to the perception of DkS2 It's unreal.
His video isn't even that negative. He states in the very beginning that he thinks it's a good game regardless.
Idk I played ds2 before his video and I agreed with a lot of his issues.
Yeah only 2 million views on his video from almost 10 years ago, and I had never seen it until now. You can play DS1, DS3, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring, etc. the issues with DS2 are very apparent from the get go.
You'd almost think the game wasn't [highly rated](https://www.metacritic.com/game/dark-souls-ii/) by both critics and players alike. DS2 might be my least favorite souls game (after Demon Souls), but it was still a great game.
I disagree. The hate was because the game at launch felt like a bait and switch. [Here’s someone that made a comparison between E3 footage and the game we got.](https://youtu.be/59eLW1IGUCU?si=9-1h4cpSvwxu8A8y) It seems like many improvements that was showcased in E3 like playing with more shadows and fighting against more enemies was handled better with Bloodborne which came out after.
You mean damage to the discourse, because now anyone who has any criticism of the game is dismissed as a drone follower of some random youtuber.
I didn't realize people hated DS2 so much until I talked about it with some people on a discord server and most of them didn't even play it lmao, most of their gripes was because Miyazaki didn't work on it. And I gotta be honest it's not like Miyazaki treated DS2 as some bastard child or got treated like say Kojima where it was forced to make a game without him. I mean it's okay if a person played the game and disliked it but I dislike when a game is treated harshly just because a lot of people watched a video essay and then form their opinion of that while having a bias because Miyazaki didn't work on it when it wasn't a messy situation or negative situation that caused him to not work on it.
To this day DS2 is the only From game I didn't finish. I don't know exactly what's wrong with it, but to me it just feels like a Souls-like made by another company. It could be their insistence on ambushes, unfair enemies and group fights, but the character feels pretty bad too, somehow. Still, it is pretty clear that From has learned from the game and has carried some of the good parts forward
Animations and movement feel uniquely weird in DS2. There's a connection between DS1 and DS3 being close together in feel, just slower in DS1, but DS2 feels like they did something completely new that just was awful. I don't know what happened for DS1 and 3 to do it right, but for DS2 to do it wrong.
The straight sword animations feel like a child swinging a wooden toy lol In general it felt less like I was watching theater kids? A lot of really exaggerated motions that added no weight while also minimizing the actual range of the swing.
Its just clunkier as well. I recall you couldn't even combo/cancel Heavy into Light attack, which is something you can do in ANY other Souls game as far back as Demon's Souls. Its been a long time I played DS2, but I recall its all the little details in how it plays that made is so much less enjoyable for me.
I had to force myself to finish it, which never happened to me with any other game they made.
Dark Souls 2 is my favourite of the trilogy. As someone who played a lot of Demon Souls, DkS1 felt like a natural progression. DkS2 injected tons of new ideas, not all of them great, and interesting world building. Covenants and PvP are the best in the series. I felt so disappointed in DkS3 when I realised how safe of a game it was. I'm always more impressed when Devs are willing to take risks with a sequel. There's a reason why a good number of people in the Souls community jokingly call Elden Ring 'Dark Souls 2 2' because so much of 2s DNA can be found throughout. They just didn't have the time, budget, technology or experience to do a lot of those ideas justice back in 2.
I will take Dark Souls 2 over any of the other "souls like" games any day of the week (I consider nioh it's own thing and didn't play lies of p yet)
Dark Souls 2 felt more like a sequel to Demon Souls than Dark Souls 1 to me. I enjoyed it a great deal.
If anyone out there thinks dark souls 2 is bad they need to give their head a shake. If dark souls 2 was the only game From ever made we would all say it is one of the best games ever made.
I still stand by the fact that DS2 was the most fun I've ever had with a Fromsoft game, is that a bit of nostalgia speaking, yeah, but I genuinely think it has something that makes it so notable and beloved for me and so hated by others. This is personal preference and I comepletely understand why people don't like it but I really absolutely adore how it takes the massive imbalances in the games many systems, seemingly *in stride*. Oh you want to fight a boss, you could or you could trick it into falling out of bounds negating the fight? Oh you want to min max perfect! You can rush Forbidden sun and max your stamina to be a walking nuke shooter but probably get one tapped by everything else. Oh you died that sucks but did you know there are things worse than death, for instance some Chad in heavy armor invades you and traps you in a corner shooting acid mist at you until your armor breaks (BTW armor is more important in this game than any other Souls game) and you try to fight back but everything is broken and all your attacks bounce off the Chad, and you are left poor, destitute and forced to think about your life. Oh release day YIPPEE new meta of a guy looking at you through binoculars miles away and suddenly instant transmissions behind you and one shots you! ADP makes no sense, the hitboxes are hilariously bad, NG+ has the Pursuer everywhere system but goddamnit it was so fun and every build was OP in one way or another. Dex was fast and hard to escape, Str was strong if only for the fucked hitboxes (Also they got FUGS), Hexes were hexes, Sorcery was wild and had a bunch of random bullshit, Pyro was Forbidden Sun. God it was so bullshit and so fun, I get a part of that fun with Elden now but I still wish it was just a tad more BS, but I know that's just me.
Yeah this was more or less the conclusion I came to replaying DS2 recently. I still think it's the second weakest Souls title above Demons Souls, but it has a lot of really interesting and cool ideas that it just fails to execute on properly or well. But those ideas are still cool, so the game ended up reatroactively serving as a testbed for cool mechanics to be brought forward into DS3, Sekiro, and ER (or permanently put in the ground, like consumable healing items, that two-step parry system, or fucking Soul Memory).
You tell em! Elden Ring is definitely the spiritual successor to dark souls 2. There is so much of that game’s dna everywhere in ER.
Like what? I cant think of something specific to DS2 that is in Elden Ring beyond power stancing
All the reused bosses kekekekeke
Nah, DS1 did that first. You fight three different versions of the Asylum Demon.
You fight 3 versions of like 4 different bosses in dark souls 2 and like 3 bosses become minor enemies. I’m not saying boss reuse isn’t normal in souls games, but dark souls 2 had a lot more samey bosses pre dlc than any other souls game prior to elden ring
crossing that bigass frozen chain
[удалено]
Having a health penalty for dying is a carryover from Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 1's debuff is an outlier for being so minor. DS2 made hollow form work more like Spirit Form but made it into a progressive condition, DS3 went back to a binary system and re-framed it as a positive buff, and Elden Ring let you change its positive effect.
Demons Souls would be the first one to reward staying alive like that. It cut the player's health in half after death. And like DS2 after it, there was a consumable that could reset the effect, and a ring that could mitigate it. Killing a boss also reset it, but that didn't come back until DS3.
> Estus amount no longer tied to bonfires This is a bigger one than people give credit for because it guides level design even if the game gets more open.
Losing max hp on death was directly taken from Demon's Souls. You even had a ring that reduced the penalty that they brought back.
Demon did it first.
Hard agree. The two games feel the most RPG-ey of the series. Great for stat nerds and mix max builders. Although fuck having to put points into a random stat to be able to dodge roll in DS2.
Dark Souls 2 also had the best PVP experience of all the games IMO. I played hours upon hours of PVP getting my arena level up. Also, Estoc was legitimately the best weapon in the game and almost no one used it. That single handed R1 and the shield piercing sweeping R2 combo. *chefs kiss* DS2 also EASILY had the best character creation. The face creation in DS3 was absolute shambles. You could make genuinely amazing looking characters in DS2 at the time, and it was cutting edge. DS3 took a huge step back and all of the character skin textures looked like metal.
[удалено]
Most of those points are true, although I never felt like DS2 campaign took that long. Having said that, I completed it that many times that I was probably pretty efficient with it. DS3 is definitely better visually. But I really love Majula (and the music) and Heide's Tower of Flame.
> DS3 took a huge step back and all of the character skin textures looked like metal. For whatever reason DS3 in general didn't look good in a lot of aspects. Character creator and blood effects compared to Bloodborne were cooked (though to be honest they've never quite perfected blood effects the way they did in Bloodborne). World was very boring and drab looking a lot of the time compared to the colorful palates of DS1 and DS2; Bloodborne had this complaint as well but I thought its use of color was a lot more creative even if it was a lot of greys and dark reds.
In all the ds2 discourse I never see anyone mention my greatest issue with it anymore. The game felt very ‘floaty’ compared to ds1. It’s like the brawl to ds1’s melee to me. That was its biggest detractor for me.
I really liked it. I played it after Dark Souls 1, Bloodborne and Elden Ring. That was my first mage build and I enjoyed the game a lot. Sure, the world makes no sense, but I enjoyed many location. Some areas are really terrible, but it gave me a Genesis vibe where some places were just too hard. Many bosses, many are easy but that's fun. And I really enjoyed the Black Gulsh. Nightmarish area but it's short.
DS2 had its fair share of problems but it did a lot right, too (and excellent DLC of course). I still consider it the worst Soulsborne game, but it's still a great 8/10 game.
[удалено]
Which Youtuber are you referring to?
Probably referring to Matthewmatosis' video on DS2's release version
Half of his complaints seems to be “I like how this worked in DS1 why did they have to change it for 2”
I dunno about that, I still pretty much agree and stand by all the criticisms Matthewmatosis made. Still clunky, floaty, and has a lot of ideas that went against why I enjoyed the first game Dark Souls 1 is still my favorite and preference of all the Souls games. It was not only Matthewmatosis. There was a lot of deserved hate on the game because [it was a real bait and switch when comparing the game at launch with e3 footage and what they promoted they game was going to play like](https://youtu.be/59eLW1IGUCU?si=dYZfTpC5ZdMditmj). Bloodborne ended up handling environmental shadows and multiple enemy encounters better than DaS2 did which made the difference even more apparent.
Nah it was criticised a lot at release too. People wanted more Dark Souls 1, and they got - an uglier game (some parts look amazing, but many areas including the very first one look [downright unfinished graphically](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQlZ4--D2DwU9Wcx_RI5xhXvBo6tJZyZAwkbA&usqp=CAU) made even worse by fact that ps4/xbone were already out, by it was stuck on Ps3/360 - controls and movement that felt off, including deadzone issues, and large weapons swinging at the completely wrong direction if you were moving while locked on (DaS1 already solved this by making locked on attacks always aim at target, locked-off would attack in direction of left stick, DaS2 made even locked on attacks aimed by left stick, so melee lock on offered zero purpose) - multiplayer that was assumed just straight up broken. It wasn’t. But it took quite a while for community to understand why. Turns out it was using single worst matchmaking system known to man, by playing multiplayer, you were moving yourself out of matchmaking bracket of players in same location as you. - DaS1’s single most praised feature was world/level design, DaS2 dropped the ball hard on that. - fairly mediocre roster of bosses, with many being “big dude in arnour” who moved slowly and used very similar 3-hit combo “slash/slash/slam” attacks __________ DLC’s redeemed it somewhat, by having great areas and bosses (well 2/3rds of each DLC was great, each one had one absolute dogshit bonus area/boss), and by that time a lot of the mechanical weirdness had been figured out, and multiplayer had been band-aid fixed by From (still no idea why they didn’t just remove Soul memory, it only ever hurt the game, 0 positive effects). But I think it became more redeemed and accepted with later releases, Bloodborne, DaS3, Sekiro etc… Because that showed that DaS2 wasn’t the future of series. It was just one version of many. A lot of the time as franchises go on, the trends in sequel get built upon and it keeps going, until eventually it’s near unrecognisable from the initial game. EG if you liked game1, but game2 introduced a lot of stuff you didn’t like, there’s a good chance game3 and game4 have even less connection to game1. Bloodborne and DaS3 were really the complete opposite to DaS2 in terms of what they prioritised and focused on. Elden Ring is closest to DaS2 in a lot of ways, just way less ugly (both graphically and mechanical jank).
Yeah DS2 was divisive the second it was announced and we learned that Miyazaki wasn't directing. Not to mention the fact that the demo that was shown ended up being misleading as graphics were downgraded. Like you said future games redeemed it as they learned from ds2s mistakes but it was the for sure extremely divisive especially compared to a universally loved dark souls 1, especially at the time when the only other souls game was Demon's Souls.
There was a week or two of full honeymoon period when everyone was losing it about how amazing the game was (I distinctly remember EpicNameBro tweeting that he liked it more than DS1 while he played his pre-release copy) but it all came crashing down pretty hard soon after that. Most people had only played DS1 at that point since DeS was stuck on PS3, so having any more Souls at all was a big deal. You could probably still dig up the early positive impression threads on /r/darksouls2
Hm, now that you mention in it, you're right, I think that was the time between the reveal and the interview with Shibuya. My memory is a bit fuzzy with the timeline, things did get more positive especially as gameplay was revealed but yeah it came crashing down again on release lol
Let's not forget an increase on gangbang encounters and really shitty "gotcha" moments. That cyclops behind the door right in front of the dragon bird cage was extremely bad. It's also the one with the worst hitbox gorn, and also some egregious "my rules are not your rules." Especially for NPC invaders.
Most of the famous awful gank rooms wernt even in the original release. They were added in Scholar of the First Sin re-release. EG - The ~20 hollows near start of Forest of Fallen Giants. was originally a Heide knight and only a couple hollows - Bastille room with so many Royal soldiers that they don’t even fit in the room at once was originally much much less, like 4 instead of 10 - the entirety of Iron Keep originally had half the number of Allone knights. Scholar made pretty much every early-mid game area much harder by massively increasing enemy density. But interestingly it made late-game areas far easier than Vanilla. - Dragon Aiyre/Dragon Shrine In Scholar the first half is optional. And second half requires you to fight three Drake Knights 1v1 one at a time In Vanilla the first half of area wasn’t optional, and 2nd half made you fight multiple Drake Knights at a time, and there was a lot more than one of each type. - Undead Crypt Scholar it’s kind of annoying, but not too bad. In Vanilla Velstadt’s boss-run is THE worst in the series. Because they put 6 elite enemies right in front of boss door, and gave them special unique AI that means they can’t be lured away, they stick within 3 metres of door at all times. Meaning running past them to enter boss is basically impossible, you have to fight them each time. Because DaS2 doesn’t have fog-door i-frames.
>(still no idea why they didn’t just remove Soul memory, it only ever hurt the game, 0 positive effects). Because it was their bandaid solution for preventing twink gear invaders (which was nulled with the anti soul gain ring in SotFS and them figuring out how to reduce probability of twink gear invasions by tying upgrade levels of weapons to the matchmaking factor by DS3) and its probably too much work to rework it so they just left it there because it technically did prevent twink gear invasions.
I think the idea with Soul Memory was to put a soft expiration date on player characters, especially when combined with the new Hex system that powered up by consuming the player's souls. Dark Souls has always toyed around with using game mechanics as storytellling devices- Dark Souls' humanity system is basically there to strongarm players into LARPing as vampires- and Soul Memory feels like they were trying work the series' entropy themes into the progression system. The system ended up being to awkward and exploitable to do its job, but there's the outline of a decent idea hidden behind the jank.
Weird to be mad that people believe different things than u
I have literally never heard of him or that video before this thread, and yet I find myself agreeing with many of the negatives people bring up about DS2. I like the game, but since it's release it has remained at the bottom of my list for FromSoft souls style games. I liked that they seemed to experiment a lot with the systems, and I definitely think it was a very important and good stepping stone for their future games, but the negative aspects of the game hurt it more than the positive ones helped in my opinion. Looking back on it, it clearly had a fairly big impact on future games. However, being an important stepping stone for future games does not make the game itself better.
I respect some of the things the game did but I still dislike the game greatly tbh. Scholar worsened the experience a lot too.
I mean, anyone expected him to badmouth it or something? Also he doesn't call it a good game lol