Dark Souls 2

Vorph_sl said:

Since you bring it up by mentioning the great scythe, my biggest complaint was the weapon redesign in Dark Souls. Demon's Souls may have had fewer options, but imo it had a lot moreviableones, and the unique weapons had a lot more flair to them. There was nothing in Dark Souls that remotely compared to the mirdan hammer; DkS' great scythe wasn't even in the ballpark. Nor was there any weapon like the BBS at all, and using BBS+Moon Uchi was by far my favorite setup in Demon's Souls. In fact, dual wield was just completely gutted to the point of uselessness, in favor of everyone using shields instead (and then all the popular ones were nerfed in the mega-patch). The only weapons I really enjoyed using in DkS were the Moonlight Greatsword and the Obsidian Greatsword--which wasn't added until the DLC and was incredibly difficult to get.

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Yeah I discussed that when I was replaying Dark Souls, there was very little variety in viable weapons. I made a dagger only char and you had so little choice, and even the choice you had was terrible, you needed to wait until you killed the lady in the painting to get the "ultimate" dagger, which was just a high base dmg dagger and that was it. No poison based daggers(which is like the very very obvious way to make a dagger "unique") and like 5daggers total, one of which was the starting shit dagger for sorcs and the other was a parry based dual wield dagger. Also as you said Dual Wield really had no point.

I hope they add more varied stuff for Dark Souls 2, and revise the combat a bit. Dual Wield should be viable somehow, parries are cool but you can parry with a shield too if you use one of the smaller ones, so there is no real advantage. Should at least open new moves(I think you can use both weapons if they're both katanas but that's it) or give a passive bonus to attackspeed or something similar, which is the easy band aid fix but still decent enough. Shortbows should maybe have combat moves too like other weapons instead of all bows mostly being the same other than stats.

Edit: Checking the wiki quickly, I see they added a dagger with the DLC, but that's still 6 total, one of which is the cursed weapon to hit ghosts with in New Londo, one is the sorc starting weap which is awful, one is the Bandit Knife which is basically what you use the whole game until you get DLC or Priscilla and the last one is the parry dagger.

Demon's Souls wasn't even all that difficult though, outside of Maneaters.
They each had their own upsides.. I would still say that DaS was the better game, regardless of how much i still think DeS is amazing

Springbok_sl said:

There were tons of good viable weps in Dark Souls. Uchi, Great Scythe, ML Greatsword, Estoc, Claymore, etc. If anything the area that needed improvement in BOTH games was ranged (xbow/bows). The system was clunky and it is next to impossible to do a full playthrough on NG+ w/ just ranged. I hope they open it up a bit more.

Shields are also not necessary at all - Just beasted a playthrough with only 2h Great Scythe and Smoughs armor and raped everything (while looking awesome as fuck). I seriously hope they stay true to their roots in the next one - best game I've played on PS3 to this day.

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You just listed a bunch of swords. Having many types of swords doesn't make it that interesting. You also said shield wasn't necessary if using a 2H, which I completely agree with, but the point was that shield was way superior to dual wielding, not that shield was necessary.

I probably didn't make my point clear enough, I didn't mean there was a small amount of weapons that were viable, but a small amount of weapon types. There was no whip progression, no good unarmed combat, daggers weren't very good or interesting, bows were boring and only useful as a secondary weapon(I did a playthrough as an archer, it was fairly horrible and it was basically retarded to beat the 4kings with a bow only because of the room having invisible walls). It felt like there was a lack of options to have very different playstyle when it came to weapons. You still had the shield+1H, 2H, pyro, mage and priest routes which is a decent amount, but I disliked the fact daggers and bows were so crappy, or that some of the styles weren't deep enough like rapiers+parry dagger duellist type build.

To illustrate my point. There are 6 daggers in the game, 5rapiers. There's 13swords, 13greatswords, 5ultra greatswords, 7curved swords, 4katanas, 3curved greatswords. That's quite a disparity in the styles imo. Even if you consider curved/katanas to not count as normal swords, there's still twice as many swords. Now I understand swords tend to be the iconic weapons and stuff, but when you have a small number like 6daggers, and then some of them are token weapons that can't even really be used as your main weapon(dagger, parry dagger, cursed blade), that severely limits the viability of the weapon type as a whole. For example if you look at 1H axes, there's only 6 of them, yet there's no completely useless weapons there, there's a progression and various options, not counting the fact you can also use greataxes too.

I'm just saying in Dark Souls 2, I hope they make daggers, dual wielding and possibly ranged more interesting. Playing the game using swords is awesome, but using daggers it's really not quite as much. I did 4 playthroughs of the game back when it was released, first one as pyromancer+quellag, second as dagger, 3rd as archer and 4th as Zweihander only. The first and 4th were very fun, the dagger one was ok and the archer one was painful.