this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2021
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Dark Souls 2 was made by a separate team and in many ways seems to completely misunderstand what made Dark Souls good. Dark Souls 3 also does to a certain extent (the level design was, in certain ways, more similar to Dark Souls 2 than 1, for example) but it is much more in line with the first game.
As for me personally (stepping out of any pretense of objectivity here) I just thought Dark Souls 2 felt somewhere between an elevated fangame and a soulless cash-grab. It seemed to think that Dark Souls was cool and popular because it was hard and you die a lot, so the best way to make a level in Dark Souls 2 is to make sure the player will die a lot and find the experience frustrating. I'm sure many of the fans of the original game will agree with me when I say that that is not why Dark Souls was cool and popular. Dark Souls was cool because every time you die, you know exactly why. You fucked up the timing, you didn't pay attention to what the environment was trying to convey to you, you didn't react fast enough, you made a mistake. The vast majority of the times I died in Dark Souls 2, until playing it for hundreds of hours and knowing all the ins and outs, I would just stare blankly at the screen and go, "Okay, yeah, I guess the game just wanted me to die. Fair enough."
If I want to play that kind of game, I'll play I Wanna Be The Guy. And don't get me wrong, I (being in the vast minority of people who live on this planet) like IWBTG and other unnecessarily, intentionally unfairly difficult games. But there's a place for them, and it's not in the Souls series.
I don't understand this take. How was DS2 any harder than DS1?
Horrible enemy placements, hollowing that reduces your health to half (ds1 doesn’t do this, ds3 has embers which just increase health by 30%), extremely low estus in the start meaning consumables are mandatory, enemies are just fast while the combat is slow so they can really surround you
Seems to me that Dark Souls 2 just tested crowd control as a skill more than DS1 did. Which seems fair to me? That's a valid skill to have in this sort of game.
I think combined with the agility mechanics especially early game fighting crowds is just not fun. They do lots of damage and stun you. Better to fight a few fewer enemies where tactics play more of a role as opposed to using cheesing as a strategy, imo, like in ds3 where you fight maybe two lothric knights at once who have varied and interesting moves
That's fair. And your point about Lothric Knights does make me realize something else- for the early game, they're a tough enemy that's also a lot of fun to fight, and I can't really think of any similar, particular enemy types in DS2 that I particularly like fighting. Like, there's very few enemies I can think of that I hate in particular, but a lot of the enemies just sort of merge together in my head. They're a bit samey, I guess.
And fair point about the early game. In part because of the Agility stuff and in part because of the level design, I've often said that DS2 is a reverse DS1. That is, in DS1, the first half is phenomenal and the second half sucks, but in DS2 it's mostly the opposite- I don't think the bad parts of DS2 are as bad as the bad parts of DS1, though.