Dark Souls 2

The entire charm of the game/series is that it's hard when done wrong, but possible to break wide open, thus encouraging you to play smart. It's like EQ in that regard.

Just like Dark Souls, once you're good enough at the game that you find it easy, you need to nerf yourself to keep it interesting.

Try a no ranged run.
Try a dual-wield only run.
Try a SL1 run.
Try a speedrun.
Try a no deaths run.
Try a no bonfires run.
Load cheat engine and try a 1HP run.
etc etc

Elerion_sl said:

The entire charm of the game/series is that it's hard when done wrong, but possible to break wide open, thus encouraging you to play smart. It's like EQ in that regard.

Just like Dark Souls, once you're good enough at the game that you find it easy, you need to nerf yourself to keep it interesting.

Try a no ranged run.
Try a dual-wield only run.
Try a SL1 run.
Try a speedrun.
Try a no deaths run.
Try a no bonfires run.
Load cheat engine and try a 1HP run.
etc etc

Click to expand...

I didn't like DS1 enough to get to that point, but I did with DS2. DS1 might actually be the better game in many ways, but while it seems like it could be more enjoyable than DS2 once you've learned it, I just couldn't stand the things it took to learn the game. It's not that it was hard, it was just such an unsatisfying experience. I prefer the general mechanics, stat system and itemization of DS1, but the gameplay just felt like being trolled by devs who deliberately made the game ridiculous for the sake of it. I like the combat difficulty but not the amount of completely nonsensical and randomly applied punishment that you have no chance to avoid until after it has happened to you and you know it's there.

I compare DS1 to a long hallway where every few steps a spike randomly comes out of the wall and kills you, so you have to start over. The first time it happens, you then know where the spike is so you can duck under it, but a few steps further ahead, it just happens again. You start over, knowing where the second spike is, but five foot past it is a third one that comes out and deals you yet another death that is utterly unavoidable until you know it's there. You do this five hundred times and then you're through the game. Once you know where the spikes are, it's pretty trivial, but the process of learning them is so stupid and laborious that I lost interest before the end. I want to be killed because I made the wrong choices, not because of something there's no possible way of preparing for until you've experienced it. I never even did the last four bosses, I'd stopped wanting to finish it by then.

It would have helped a lot with a travel system (teleporting in DS1 doesn't become available until you're like 75% of the way through the game) and a more sensible placement of bonfires, both of which DS2 has done much better, as well as toning down the amount of objectively unreasonable bullshit that DS1 slaps you in the face with every five minutes. It's a shame they couldn't recreate the atmosphere and mechanical depth of DS1. I'm too fucking old to play a game where I have to manually travel everywhere and dying (which is designed to happen constantly) means I have to spend ten minutes of tedious re-clearing of content I've just done in order to get back to where I was.

Please list some "unreasonable bullshit" auto deaths in DS1. The only thing I can remember which I would call that is one particular Giant Skeleton. Everything else that comes to mind is either heavily telegraphed or relatively harmless.

DS1 works just fine without teleports. Its level design gives constantly gives you shortcuts back to safe territory. At the point where those shortcuts stop showing up, you'll have the ability to port.

Are you serious? There'scountlessexamples. Shit like the little fuckers in Blighttown that will one-shot toxin you from so far away that their models don't load; the floor that breaks and plunges you directly into the Stray Demon boss fight (and knocks off half your health from the fall) without any warning whatsoever; the archers in Anor Londo; various rooms in New Londo Ruins where five ghosts will come out of the walls all around you; the skeleton wheel things in the Catacombs which will kill you in a quarter of a second from across the room; the giant skeletons in Tomb of Giants (an area that's literally completely black, you can see half a foot in front of you, and any wrong step means you fall to your death). There's too many examples to name.

Basically every single area has at least half a dozen places where you will die more or less automatically, instantaneously and with no warning or opportunity to prepare at all until you know it's there through experience. It's obvious that the developers intended this, obvious enough that claiming it doesn't exist is frankly retarded. I'd take you more seriously if you just said you were okay with it being there.

Seems a bit cuntish to simply declare that "DS1 works fine without teleports." Maybe you didn't mind the lack of a travel system, but I got pretty fucking tired of having to run everywhere for the vast majority of the game, because you end up spending literally hours upon hours just hiking back and forth through content you've already exhausted. Shortcuts tend to be towards the end of a level and they don't do much about the need to travel between areas. It's still easily a 5-10 minute run to get from one place to another which you have to do many, many,manytimes over the course of a playthrough. I'd say I spent easily 20% of my time just footing it across the world through content I'd beaten, which was so boring that I haven't cared to replay the game at all.

DS1 bred a weird kind of elitist snob gamers who think that tolerating things like enormous amounts of pointless travel time made them better than others, but it's really nothing more than gaming flaggelantism. Do you run everywhere in DS2 because it "works fine"?

DS2 has drastically different level design, the maps are long and branch out linearly in various directions. In DS1 you're almost always travelling in an upward/downward spiral to allow for quick vertical shortcuts past tons of content. What 5-10 minute runs through old content do you find yourself doing often?

As for your examples:
Blighttown fuckers take 2 hits to toxin if you wear some poison resistance. After you've been toxined once, you should know to walk around with a poison resistant shield everywhere down there. They're annoying as shit, but they never lead to unavoidable deaths.
Stray Demon entrance is a surprise, but it's the way the fight is supposed to start. There's no unavoidable death there, just a surprise boss fight.
Anor Londo archers don't one-shot you. It's a hard encounter, but again, highly avoidable.
If you aren't able to realize that you should move slowly and pull ghosts back in New Londo to avoid ghost clusterfucks you are bad at vidya games.
Skeleton Wheel dudes, yeah, I'll grant you that one. That's pretty much bullshit the first time you enter that room.
There's one "unavoidable" death by Giant Skeleton in Tomb of Giants which I already mentioned. And you're not supposed to clear that area without a light source (as a new player).

Shit is hard, but moving slowly and playing smart will allow you to survive pretty much all that shit even the first time you meet it. I'm not saying I didn't die to it, but it was my fault for not being observant, not the game being unfair.

Lenas_sl said:

Yeah, try doing a no bonfire, no death, or both, in NG+

People say there are hardly any differences in NG+ but compared to the other games it's the most they've ever done. Not just higher numbers but more mobs and even a surprise boss fight.

Click to expand...

Most people will find No Bonfire/No Death is easier in NG+ because they can easily come into NG+ with a couple hundred of the various items that restore spell uses. I might have tried it (without cheesing like that) but the rewards are just dumb PVP rings that I wouldn't even use if I did PVP.

While I agree that there's more to NG+ in DkS2 than in the previous games, it just wasn't enough to hold my interest in the game itself.

axeman_sl said:

DS1 bred a weird kind of elitist snob gamers who think that tolerating things like enormous amounts of pointless travel time made them better than others, but it's really nothing more than gaming flaggelantism. Do you run everywhere in DS2 because it "works fine"?

Click to expand...

I don't even like Dark Souls much (Demon's Souls is still the best Souls game by a large margin) and even so I'm trying to figure out how you played the same game as the rest of us. And like Pyros said, DkS2 is far worse for throwing cheap shit at the player. Well, he said equal, but I consider the retarded pivoting everything does to track you the pinnacle of cheap design.

There's no such thing as a "cheap" death in a game. You'd have a case if developers programmed boulders to randomly fall from the sky and squash players in order to impede progress. The things you're describing, such as spike traps and a floor giving way, are surprising moments that you learn to deal with. Do you want a damn prompt for everything a game throws at you?

Lenas_sl said:

Yeah, try doing a no bonfire, no death, or both, in NG+

People say there are hardly any differences in NG+ but compared to the other games it's the most they've ever done. Not just higher numbers but more mobs and even a surprise boss fight.

Click to expand...

what surprise boss fight? Twin pursuers?

Goddamn the Ancient Dragon is a fucking retardedly designed fight. Bait him into a harmless AI loop where he can't touch you and you can literally punch him to death naked, but if you make one wrong step or don't know how to bait him in the first place you just instantly die. What's frustrating is there is no learning curve at all involved here. You will just plain die over and over and over until you look up a video on one of the possible ways to cheese him, and then he's trivial.

For an endgame character, what are the better Strike type weapons?

Dandai_sl said:

For example, I just got to an area in dark souls 1 where I was crossing a bridge in the catacombs and it was turned over, upending me over the side (to my death on the valley floor below). The bridge didn't move at all until I was over halfway across it. There was no way I was making it to either end safely before I was pitched off. I read the wiki out of curiosity (to see if that was avoidable), and it turns out it happens to everyone (unless you kill a certain NPC first maybe?). Anyway, this didn't heighten my gameplay experience at all, and I put the game down for a while because of it.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's a scripted betrayal from a certain NPC. I never encountered it because the order in which I do the game means I encounter him in a different location, where his betrayal is non-lethal (and pretty cool). Pretty dumb that they decided to make it an instagib in one location.

I had to stop playing this while I was moving, finally getting back into it as of last night. Got up to the sentinels and almost killed them on my 3rd try before getting too greedy and dying (we all have gotten to greedy once or a hundred times and felt the disappointing loss at 5%). Game is so awesome.

Quineloe_sl said:

For an endgame character, what are the better Strike type weapons?

Click to expand...

Big, slow weapon: Dark Sacred Chime Hammer+5 buffed with Resonant Weapon. Possibly power-stanced with one of the cheater greataxes (black dragon, lion's, bandit, etc.) if you like extra cheese and have the 68+ str to do it.

Small, fast weapon: Dark/Lightning/Fire Barbed Club+5 buffed with the matching element. Also works well power-stanced if you have a pair of them.

Quineloe_sl said:

what surprise boss fight? Twin pursuers?

Click to expand...

Freja. Not really a boss fight, but still.

I officially dislike the Smelter Demon. After dying to him about 10 times (goddamn fire mode that I can't completely block), I (shamefully)looked up a strategy online and the top tip was to get a Gyrm Greatshield which isn't available for about 4 or 5 more areas from where I am now. Weak.

That's not really correct. Kill Lost Sinner, loot Fragrant Branch of Yore, use that to free the pyromancer, go through shaded woods to the shaded ruins section, kill the boss there and you're already in Doors of Pharakos. That is really just 4 zones, Heide's tower of flame, No man's wharf, Bastille and shaded woods, five if you start with FOFG, which you should. Since you did unlock Huntsman's Copse, you already did Heide's tower of flame.

Smelter Demon and Iron keep is actually the dead end of the path you're on. It can be done first, or last. Since Smelter Demon is incredibly hard, I'd suggest doing that one last.

I used the pool of water (lockstone) above where the dull ember was, Flash Sweat, and my Old Knight Shield+6 to beat it with melee. That shield has 70% fire protection naturally, and if you're really desperate you can temporarily enchant it with fire and then remove it once Smelter is dead.

Also, it helps to use a longer weapon. I remember that my mace wasn't really cutting it, so I ended up using a lightning spear instead. He's weak to both strike and pierce, as well as lightning, so it worked pretty well.

And if all else fails, just summon the NPC for it. That fight counts as part of her quest series if you're after the trophy.

There are two hard parts about that fight:
- Learning to recognize when he will do his explosion attack after leap (run away!) and when he won't (free attack time!)
- Killing him before his flame damage wears you down

The first is just experience, the second is just a matter of having a good enough weapon (+10 or better). Throw one of the 50 weapon buff consumables you have to make it even shorter.

I won't lie, I probably died 15 times to him, but he doesn't require any specific gear to beat.