What makes

Question

What makes

Melanie · Answer

I don’t think it’s a bad game, but as a casual player of the series, it just didn’t feel like it fit right.          Level Design   This one was a big one for me. I really liked the original Dark Souls level design, and I think it’s a masterclass in world design as well.        For instance, from the Firelink Shrine, you could see a lot of the map. And as you explored that map, a lot of it made sense. Richer and higher status places were up high; bergs were crammed between castles and open spaces. Places like Blighttown fit as a poverty-stricken undercity to the city above and rested between exits in the sewers, the Valley of Drakes, and Queelag’s.  The interiors of a lot of structures, even if broken, made sense: stairways went to logical places, and a lot of areas felt like they were once lived in.  Dark Souls 2 however, didn’t have that same feeling.        For instance, in the Sunken City DLC a lot of structures don’t make any logical sense; they have four walls, random drop offs, and really just serve to make a maze, not a structure that ever felt lived in.  Same with interiors later on; there was a point before the final two boss fights where you drop down to the gate, and each platform looks broken or has stairs that fell apart, and nothing logically looks like it goes anywhere.  I felt this through most of Dark Souls 2; the level design was difficult, and yes, it had elements of the first game to it, but nothing felt like it made any kind of logical sense put together.   Lore         The original game’s lore was mysterious and hidden behind a lot reading, and a lot of contextual guessing. Still, you could get the bare-bones threads by talking to everyone you met multiple times and keeping your eyes open. I am 100% casual when it comes to this game, and even so, I found the world of the first game to be fascinating.  Dark Souls 2 though, aside from a pretty cool intro, just feels extremely removed from the first game. It almost feels like a soft reboot, or at least it did until I played 3 and had more of a timeline figured out between the games.  The characters you meet, (if you can find them), don’t provide a lot of useful exposition, and most of them, (like you at the start of the game) are in the process of hollowing and losing themselves, so at least there’s a reason.  Still, unlike the first game, where at least I had a sense of purpose and mission, (driven by curiosity to see what happens), the sequel just begs you to seek out stronger souls, and tells you there are four of them.   Nothing felt as connected, (and I use that term loosely, this  is   Dark Souls we’re talking about).   Gameplay         Like I said, I’m a casual. I really suck at these games, and what really fascinates me and pulls me in though is the world, lore, and exploration. Dark Souls, the first game, was like a Metroidvania game in 3D and on steroids. I freely admit I used a guide the first time I played it, because I was getting crushed.  But, I recently did a replay and did mostly guide-free, with the exception of a few tips for game play route so that I could meet most of the NPC’s and follow their threads.  Other than that though, if you play it for a while and start to get a feel for how things are hidden, or the logic behind some of the level design, you start to get a much better feel of how to clear an area and find all the hidden goodies.  Dark Souls 2, however, felt like an exercise in frustration.  This area is full of poison. This area is full of things that turn you to stone. This area has a thousand pointless drop offs. This area is ALSO full of poison, AND full of things that turn you to stone. And what a shock… this area is loaded with a thousand ways to fall for no good reason.  Dark Souls was an exercise is frustration, but at least it felt purposeful. Blighttown had intense verticality and poison, but it wasn’t anything like Darkroot Garden or Basin, which had their own problems and were mostly free of vertical drops, with the exception of the path that leads between the two areas.  Undead Burg is crawling with undead enemies, but not every area you encounter is; some areas will skip having lots of little enemies in favor of just having two really big ones to contend with, or you might get a good stretch of space somewhere where you don’t encounter anything, and sometimes that creeps you out the most.  Dark Souls 2 gameplay just felt purposefully frustrating. I don’t think good level design is made when you just design an area and fill it with as many bad guys as you can, and then have the AI have them all aggro and race across the map if they see you.        No Man’s Wharf and the Gutter just basically felt like you’re being chased most of the time, with the added bonus in the Gutter of having pointless drops.  And unlike Blighttown, the Gutter feels extra pointless, because unlike Blighttown, it feels like a level to have a level, not because it actually feels like anyone would have naturally been there. Blighttown feels like the ultimate slum, attached at the butt-end of the lower dregs of society. In terms of world building, it makes sense where it fits and why it’s vertical.  The Gutter, on the other hand, doesn’t. I found myself struggling through the verticality, darkness, AND poison again without ever getting a sense of why this place exists, or who might have lived here, or how it fit in relation to the rest of the game’s world.  It’s difficult to be difficult, and it’s made difficult by being artificially cheap.        And I felt like that about a lot of areas in Dark Souls 2. It’s still in some ways an interesting world and I feel like there’s a sense of how it connects, but difficulty doesn’t feel tied to the elements in Dark Souls 1 that felt like it made sense.  Having a hundred statues shooting poison darts at you while enemies drop on your head through holes in the ceiling as you scramble in the dark and try not to fall through holes and ledges can be fun… to a point. But if you feel like there really is no point, the frustration just sets in with nothing much to help power through it.   Mechanics         I am a filthy casual. I totally accept that. I run around with sword and board most of the time, blocking and then striking. I’m not fancy, I can’t parry worth a damn, and my sense of timing is awful.  That said, Dark Souls made my playstyle feel pretty viable and ok to stick to. Dark Souls 2 made it feel like it was NECESSARY. There’s a big difference there.  I started Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin as a Swordsman, because I wanted to try to learn to parry properly and I heard dual wielding was possible. That all pretty much ended immediately due to the sheer amount of enemies you face early on and how I was swarmed. As soon as I got my first greatsword and could do some really big damage on each swing, my time as a dual wielding swordsman pretty much ended.  It wasn’t just that though. Dark Souls 2 level design loves pointless outer walkways with no railings and hidden enemies around corners in a way the first game used way more sparingly. No one would actually build something like that, and that’s one of my biggest gripes between game 1 and 2; Dark Souls usually would only do it with a justification like a broken railing, a tower that fell apart, or a walkway that used to be wide and safe; Dark Souls 2 doesn’t have that. At Sinner’s Rise, for instance, you’re weaving into and out of a tower that has unrailed walkways peppering the outside of the tower for most of the climb for no reason.  And because of that, I ended up having a shield out 99% of the time, and walked really slowly through a lot of areas. Dark Souls 2 felt like it was forcing me to use very linear tactics because there was a huge emphasis on being in tight spaces. Shield/Disc Chime/Sanctum Shield + Sun Sword/Greatsword/Spear/or Pyromancy.  Again… I’m not a good player, I’m really casual. I’m sure there are experts who can play as anything they want. What I’m saying is that with my level of ability, the game felt like it pushed me towards a specific playstyle if I wanted to stay alive instead of being killed in cheap ways, like being swarmed on a tiny ledge.   Enemies   I don’t think any enemy from Dark Souls 2 exemplifies my issue with the game in comparison to Dark Souls quite like the Phantoms in Shaded Wood.        Originally, I wrote about the exploding mummies in the Lost Bastille, but as I was doing another playthrough of the game, I changed my mind and switched to the Phantoms instead.  This is a great example of being cheap. First up, the area they are in is shrouded in dense fog you can’t really see through. That’s challenge enough, but then the game decides to pile on that you can’t lock on to these enemies. But since that’s STILL not enough, you can’t hear them, the Ring of Whispers won’t give you any clues about them being around, AND they are so transparent that they are almost invisible.  This is a great example of being cheap. Any ONE of these elements is enough to make whatever bad guy you’re facing much more difficult, but throwing all of these at you at once feels like overkill.  In Dark Souls III, right at the start, you’re confronted with just a few enemies with one trick: they strike three times in succession rapidly. If you’re not careful since you’re in very little armor and have little in the ways of health and striking power, they can chop you up pretty handily, especially if there are more than one of them. But it doesn’t feel cheap; you can choose to block, or dodge, or time their strikes and then hit when they are taking a break, or any number of early tactics. You’ll die if you’re not careful, but you’re not dying because they can’t be targeted, seen, heard, or locked onto.  The main problem I have is that they just feel cheap, and most of the enemies in Dark Souls 2 feel that way. In Dark Souls, you can usually get a rhythm going once you get to know your opponents. You know which ones are going to be weak, (like the three undead outside the Undead Parish on the run to the blacksmith), you know which ones you want to run past until you have better weapons, (the Crystal bad guys near the Hydra), and the size of enemies tends to make sense with the environment, (like Anor Londo having castles meant for Giant Sized people, therefore most of your opponents are enormous).  More isn’t always better. Layering up elements isn’t always as fun or challenging as just having one strong opponent in front of you barring the way. Yes, there are times you are being mobbed in Dark Souls and Dark Souls III, but death is usually avoided if you’re careful and keen to learn. In Dark Souls 2, there are so many elements going in some encounters that you don’t feel like you died because you made a mistake, you feel like you died because the designers did.  Compared to the first and third games, parts of DS II I believe are over tuned.          I don’t think Dark Souls 2 is a ‘bad’ game, per se. I don’t think it’s as good as the original in terms of level design, world design, enemy design, and tying everything together.  But for sure, it’s definitely a Dark Souls game, and there are some really cool elements to it. It looks a lot less washed out that DS 1 or 3, Majula as a hub is kind of cool once it starts getting fleshed out with the NPC’s you find, and there is a lot of great gear to deck out your character with.  My main issues with the game really come down to how it all ties together, or more accurately, how it doesn’t.  Dark Souls feels like it has invisible threads in the design; this stairway was meant to go somewhere, this walkway that’s broken is broken, but the other side has a purpose and you can see it used to have a function. Sen’s Fortress is one of the only places that feels like a murder house, but that’s what it was actually designed for: it was a test for those trying to get to Anor Londo the hard way. It’s meant to be a murder house, which is why the layout and design are purposefully frustrating. It’s a crappy place full of traps and lethal bad guys because according to the lore, it’s meant to be. Compare that to Earthen Rise, which is Sen’s funhouse, but without a clear reason as to why it is the way it is. It’s a murder mill built on top of a poison field… but why? And having the Heirs to the Sun shrine stuck in a cave over the left and so far removed from anything close to glorifying the sun? That’s the kind of choices that make my scratch my head.  Dark Souls 2, as I mentioned when I talked about the 1st DLC, visibly has broken walkways that you fall on top of where the only function of that broken walkway is to BE broken; if it was finished, it leads into a wall on both ends, not doors that go somewhere. It’s elements piled on top of each other to make a pathway down that don’t actually have a purpose beyond being the path the player takes downward.  That’s where I feel Dark Souls 2 becomes a little bit of a bad game in a way the original didn’t. A lot of it feels like assets used to make levels, and the levels are made to be difficult, but each level feels like it’s lacking the cohesion with what’s around it and it how it all ties together as a world.  In the first game, I could imagine myself as a Paladin maneuvering through a dying world in his last throes of life before his inevitable end, and fighting through to light the last fire to make his life have one final purpose. I built a mediumly tanky character with high faith for miracles and it felt awesome.  In Dark Souls 2, my character feels kind of pointless, and chasing down the boss souls feels like going through the motions. Things in the level design and enemy design feel so cheap at times I’m less invested into the world and my character doesn’t feel like they have any real purpose as to why they plug forward.  I played Dark Souls 1 & 3, and never felt that way. But I do feel that way in Dark Souls 2, where my only real goal in finishing it is to actually finish it. In the others, I wanted to finish them because it felt like it brought my characters’ story to a close.  That’s the difference to me. Dark Souls 2 is a good game in a lot of ways: it’s got some very difficult design, very cool weapons and armor, a lot of great fighting when the enemies aren’t being cheap as hell, and the game doesn’t hold your hand pretty much at all. But I think it misses the boat in cohesion.

Elliana · Answer

What makes it bad is the horrible level design (Iron Keep being the worst in the series), GANK and the overall washed out look of the game. You know From has stuffed artificial difficulty in a souls game when the enemies stop respawning after killing them a number of times (I believe it’s around ten but I can’t be exact). Other souls games punish you for your mistakes. DS2 punishes you just for the sake of it. Again, Iron Keep being the prime example (but not the only one by far). After the first bonfire, you immediately face a knight running after you. Then after the first doorway, there are about three more in a small area. Then after that there are archers everywhere with pinpoint accuracy and more knights that aggro from a ridiculous distance. On top of that, you have red phantoms that spawn every now and then. All of this and a boss before the second Bonfire.
A great example for the artificial difficulty is when you have to travel though a tight corridor but a fat turtle guy who can end you in two hits is blocking your path. So instead of being able to plan and move around him, you’re basically forced to combat him head on.
The bosses are also the worst of the series. Ironically they’re the easiest parts of the game but they’re also bland and unimaginative.
You can also tell they were lazy with how the areas connect with one another. On the approach to Drangleic Castle, you can clearly see it’s on the left side of the view. You walk through a straight tunnel only to come out and go right to enter it. None of the geography makes any sense and there are many more instances of this.
I beat the game because I wanted to at least say I’ve beaten all souls games and I can comment on it because I played through it. Unlike the other ones though, there is no way I’m finishing a NG+. One of the best things about the others was doing multiple runs using different builds to see how OP I could become because that was the reward for beating the games multiple times. I had a blast finally getting through them for the first time and wasting no time with NG. When I beat DS2 I felt nothing good at all. It was more like I finished a chore. I wanted to like it but I couldn’t.
I hear others say it’s an alright game just not a good souls game. I personally think the game is pure trash.

Madelyn · Answer

Here are a few things wrong with Dark Souls 2.
Hitboxes – Phantom radiuses and broken hitboxes can be found in any and all Soulsborne games, but Dark Souls 2 is an entirely different level of mechanical deficit. With Scholar of the First Sin, Fromsoftware made an attempt to fix them, but there is still tons to be found. Ranges from boss battles to mobs and specific weapon types, such as katanas.
If I die, I expect it to happen because of my mistake, but unfortunately, when playing Dark Souls 2, it`s like I`m not fighting my opponents, but Fromsoftware themselves.
Cheese for everyone – Certain areas and their designs in Dark Souls 2 reek of incompetence, the outright gangrape of mobs that was so apparent that SOTFS nerfed them, but pre-nerf, many areas truly feel like they weren`t tested at all or even given a quick run-through by the devs. Pre-nerf Shrine of Amana, just to give you one example, is the worst area I`ve ever seen in a Souls game. Waist deep water, frequent creeks, underwater lurkers and ranged casters which release projectiles (that track you extremely hard) at you while being so far away they are literally not even rendered yet by the engine, the arrows just come from nowhere. All at the same time.
Many areas in the game require the player to cheese the living soul out of them. Hide behind a wall and tediously, slowly snipe everything with a bow, actually respec your character because a pure meele build is simply incompatible, hide behind a greatshield, etc. You have to cheese and compromise your playstyle way too frequently in order to get through an area without suffering a mental breakdown. Having to play a certain way excluding the established options for the sake of a certain situation is just bad design.
Bullshit – I love it when I hit my opponent, but for some reason, the attack pushes them out of my hitbox and the 3rd or 4th attack misses, opening me up for an instant counter, which led me to my death more than anything else, the one last attack I would land which would save my life and end my opponent before he can counter, but no, because the game design is unstable on purpose.
When a mob with 1OO points of health at most miracoulously survives the slash of my katana that does 25O base damage with 2 points of health left, which will require me to land another strike and waste precious time and stamina, which will lead to your death far more frequently than you would expect.
How your dodging iFrames are now stat-based, meaning that in order to be able to dodge the broken hitboxes the game faces you with, you don`t have to “Git Gud”, you have to spend hundreds of thousands of souls to even get yourself to the Dark Souls 1 level of possibility to git gud. Outright gangrapes of mobs, paths leading to boss fight delivered through outrageously hard map layouts and literal armies of mobs, etc.
This is called bullshit artistry. A deliberate, cheap and uninspired way of raising difficulty in an unfair and frankly, childish way.
Difficult for the sake of being difficult – Dark Souls 2 has no philosophy seated behind its design. In Dark Souls, whenever the game punishes you, it serves a purpose, it is there to teach and prepare you for other such and similar design traps as you progress through the game, you are forced to master the game designs philosophy.
Dark Souls 2 entirely disregards that approach and the purpose of the game design shallows down to “Haha, you`re dead, get fucked”.
Design traps are specific and exclusive to the area they are present in, they don`t teach you anything about how to approach the game, but only teach you that in this specific part of the game, in this specific room and in this specific situation, you need to watch out for this specific trap, spawn or poise.
The game punishes you exclusively and for no deducable reason, you have to master a specific location all the time that will never help you again, that you won`t have to bother to prepare for again, that doesn`t serve a universal purpose. You don`t master Dark Souls 2, you master fragments of the overall game design one by one and exclusively, which in the end leaves you with a feeling of emptiness, wasted time and no sense of tangible progression or accomplishment.

Is Dark Souls 2 a bad game? No, Dark Souls 2 is not a bad game.
But it`s the worst Soulsborne title to date, it reminds me of a cheap rip-off that failed to even imitate the idea behind Soulsborne.

Chicago Cutlery Belden 15 Piece Premium Kitchen Knife

Reply

Kinsley · Answer

Adaptability/Agility stat for Iframes is a game killer by itself. Then you tack on Despawning enemies, which makes farming souls and gear freaking impossible. The Hollowing mechanic that shrinks your health bar upon death every single time you die. Enemy gank squads. Can’t pull single enemies for 1v1, they all aggro together. Not enough estus in early game to make up for all of the crappy game mechanics mentioned prior. The biggest flaw is the game simply isn’t fun. It isn’t hard, but fair like other titles. The game simply feels unfair, which makes it unfun. It is rage inducing if anything.

Authentic XYJ Since 1986,Outstanding Ancient Forging,6.7 Inch Full Tang

Reply

Amelia · Answer

It lacks a lot of the polish from the other games in the series, the hit boxes are broken, lack of boss variety, and in terms of lore the story is weak.
In the first game the story and build up sets up the desolation and sadness you find in the bosses and environment after hearing of all the greatness, but the second has a weak story but just makes everything desolate anyway, the hollowed king is unlike Gwynn who was fallen from being a god and out into a pathetic state, he’s just a boss that’s not special in any means.
While the last giant is just a weak boss that doesn’t make you feel anything, especially with it being the first boss, DS2 is by no means a bad game, just worse than the others in the series, and the dlc wasn’t great either, horsefuck valley echos through the minds of many players.

Eden · Answer

Dark Souls 2 isn't a bad game at all. In fact, it is my favorite in the series. However, it is now popular opinion in the souls community that it is the worst souls game, especially when compared to the first game. Honestly, Dark Souls 2 was doomed from the start when it was announced that Miyazaki, the God of souls community, was not working on the game. There are, of course, some other factors too.  Some of the factors that determined this are as follows:   Level design:   Dark Souls had a masterfully crafted interconnected world. Many different areas looped in and connected with each other in the most unexpected ways. This made it a truly unique experience to explore Lordran. The latter half of the game was horribly flawed however.  Dark Souls 2 on the other hand had a very linear and simple level design. You simply go through very linear paths via very disjointed areas to get to your goals. The transition between the areas makes no sense most of the time. However, the world 'looked' better to me. You go through so many more diverse areas. A sunken and broken medieval city which was once great and majestic, a broken down mining plant so overused that the Earth below began spewing poison, a Keep greedily built with so much iron that it started to sink into the Earth as lava gushed out from beneath. At some point, I just wanted to see these cool new areas without really caring much about how I got there.   Story and NPC characters:   This is Dark Souls 2's biggest flaw. If you play a souls game for its story or characters, you should definitely stay away from dark souls 2. Dark Souls 1 had a good and satisfying story, however vague it might have been. The characters all had their motives, they did their own thing, they moved about while you played the game, they felt alive. Dark Souls 2, however, had a very incomplete and unsatisfying story. The characters are just there for the sake of convenience except for maybe 2 of them. Most character just exist to sell you stuff and sit around in the hub world without really wishing to accomplish anything other than to serve you. This made them feel very robotic and uninteresting.   Difficulty:   Ah, now this is an interesting one. A lot of people like to think that Dark Souls 2 artificially tries to add difficulty to the game by placing more enemies at every encounter to challenge you. Everyone seems to complain about getting into group fights almost as if it rarely happened in Dark Souls 1. I don't really get it. Right from the start of the game after the tutorial, you head into undead burg. Here you fight 2 hollow warriors and Knights at the bottom of the stairs while someone else throws firebombs down at you. Once you go up the stairs, 2 more hollow warriors wait to ambush you. If that isn't a gank, I don't know what is.  There are instances when you have to fight at least 10-15 charging hollows at once with a spell caster buffing them, bunch of hollow Knights with a heavily armored boar in the same place, 3-4 fat hollows that throw giant boulders at you while you slowly traverse through a poison swamp, 2-3 giant cat minibosses, 6-7 giant skeletons in a closed dark space, etc. And this is all just from top of my head.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about these encounters. I appreciate a challenge in my PvE and these encounters grant just that, although sometimes it is pretty cheap. I just don't understand it though when they blame Dark Souls 2 for doing the same thing though.  The healing system that allowed you to heal with unlimited lifegems however, did retract from the experience. There’s a lot of tension in the souls series when you’re low on estus and desperately need to find the next bonfire. This tension is taken away when you have an unlimited supply of lifegems to rely on.   Boss variety:   Dark Souls 2 is often blamed for putting in too many humanoid bosses with similar movesets i.e. 'too many dudes in armor'. This is true, their movesets are similar and you can generally start predicting their attacks because of a similar sword fighting style. However, the bosses themselves were unique enough for me to enjoy fighting them. Also some of the greatest bosses in all of the souls series are, in fact, humanoid. Artorias of the Abyss, Fume Knight Raime, Sir Alonne, Burnt Ivory King, Gherman, Lady Maria, The Undead Legion Abysswatchers, Soul of Cinder and even Lady Freida are all humanoid and are really good bosses.   Bad mechanical changes:   One of the biggest flaws of Dark Souls 2 was the soul memory system. It was created for good intentions against 'twinks', players who stay at a low level and only upgrade their weapons and armor to have an unfair edge over players they invade. This did cut down on twinks a little bit but limited everyone's build making and no one could stay at a matchmaking level to coop or pvp so it did more bad than good.  Also, agility stat for rolling iframes got a lot of flak but I personally don't mind it. It’s a more useful stat than resistance at least and adds some depth to builds.   Combat and PvP:   This is where Dark Souls 2 shines. The combat of Dark Souls 2 found a balance of polish and speed that capitalizes the style of gameplay that Dark Souls is so well known for. The clunky 4 directional rolling of Dark Souls was replaced by a much needed omnidirectional roll. Although the pace felt slower, the weapon attack animations were much more realistic and carried a lot more weight into each swing. Each weapon had an additional strong attack, which added a lot more variety to an already overwhelming number of weapons. Even weapons in the same class usually had very different movesets. You also had the ability to speed up many strong attacks by following them up after another particular attack, something that no other souls game has offered I think.  PvP connectivity and netcode is still far from perfect but much better than ds1. Even in terms of balancing, it did a great job. The build variety was massive and even the amount of armor and weapons you had available to you allowed for some of the best customization in the series.  If you enjoy pvp and overall combat mechanics like me, Dark Souls 2 is the game for you.   To conclude:   So there, Dark Souls 2 has some really great parts and some really bad parts. That's doesn't mean it's objectively a bad game. You just have to decide for yourself if it is a game for you. If you play a game for exploration, story, characters, etc. this isn’t the game for you. If, however, you are more interested in the actual gameplay mechanics and combat then this is the strongest contender in the whole series. Don’t let popular opinion sway you.

Peyton · Answer

There are a number of reasons that Dark Souls 2 is the red-headed step child of the Soulsborne games.

Let’s start with the general problems surrounding Dark Souls 2:
Dark Souls 2 like many other controversial games got off to a bad start due to being downgraded from the trailers and demos. In marketing material for Dark Souls 2 the game looked a lot better and had very good lighting engine. Both of those were downgraded for the full release due to performance issues. The lighting engine in particular was a big loss because you can see that a lot of the game was designed around it with the torch mechanic and with the special lighting engine removed the game felt a lot more flat than advertised. People take poorly to being lied to and deceived so Dark Souls 2 got off to a bad start.
Due to the success of Dark Souls and how much of an improvement it was over Demon’s Souls many people were extremely hyped for Dark Souls 2 and they believed that it too would be a huge increase in quality as the previous game had been. When Dark Souls 2 ended up being a good game rather than a masterpiece these people felt very disappointed and letdown. This is part marketing’s fault for getting people so hyped (which is their job but it can obviously backfire) and part the community’s fault for getting too hyped and the lashing out because their impossible expectations had not been met.
Dark Souls has one of the most rabid of rabid gaming communities and as a result Dark Souls 2 was always going to struggle dealing with the nostalgia of the first game. It was always going to be a case of some fans being unfairly harsh on Dark Souls 2 because no matter how hard it tried it wasn’t Dark Souls. Therefore anything that changed was automatically bad because it wasn’t Dark Souls while anything that didn’t change was bad because it was just lazy copying. Dark Souls 2 was always in an unenviable and impossible position.
The Dark Souls 2 PC port was also a mess. The developers didn’t bother to change the UI so it still had the Xbox 360 key bindings on it. The game also doesn’t play nice with a mouse and keyboard. The PC version has a few new bugs such as crashing on launch. This is all after From Software promised to focus on the PC port as Dark Souls was their first PC port and it came out terribly and only worked after the community patched it to work properly. Another promise broken after the visual downgrade.
Dark Souls 2 was re-released with the Scholar of the First Sin edition that massively reworked many parts of the game including adding some more stuff and changing the placement of enemies and items and upgraded the graphics. However in order to get these you had to buy the game again and many people felt ripped off because of this.
Then we get the problems with the game itself. I am going to be making a lot of comparisons between Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2. It is not because I think that Dark Souls is a flawless masterpiece (it is not) but simply because it did that particular thing better and as a result Dark Souls 2 feels like a regression as it already had the correct template to work from. Anything that I don’t mention is fine and probably an improvement because this answer is long enough without having to discuss things that aren’t a problem.
Level design has always been a strong point in the Souls series but Dark Souls 2 has incredibly weak level design.
Dark Souls levels are at their best when they are large semi-open levels that twist, turn and fold back in on themselves encouraging exploration. Most of Dark Souls 2’s levels are basically just straight tunnels leading to dead ends. Some might be very pretty and squiggly tunnels but at the end of the day they are still little more than a straight-ish passage between the bonfire at the start and the boss at the end. The later games go back to this design philosophy and are much stronger for it.
Dark Souls has always had a strong sense of space where even as you explored the world you would see something off in the distance and when you eventually fought your way there it would make sense as to how you got there. It gives the world this natural geography and you could always tell tell where you are going and where you had come from. Dark Souls 2 has a very weak sense of space. Nothing feels like where it is supposed to be and the world lacks a feeling of geographical logic. The most notorious example of this is when you ride the elevator up from Earthen Peak and arrive in a castle surrounded by lava in a way that makes zero sense.
On a level by level basis most of Dark Souls 2’s levels are pretty drab and boring in terms of design. Even ignoring the problem of them simply being tunnels they mostly lack any interesting design concepts that make them stand-out or they stand out for the wrong reasons (I am looking at you Doors of Pharros). The only levels in Dark Souls 2 that managed to stick in my memory are Heide’s Tower of Flame and the Shrine of Amana. Everything else seems to blur together. In comparison to the other games in the series Dark Souls 2 levels just don’t really stand out.
On a more micro-level most of the levels in Dark Souls are very questionably designed. There are odd enemy, item and bonfire placements. In Sinner’s rise there are enemies that spawn right next to the bonfire and will attack you the moment that you spawn and are extremely vulnerable. In Lost Bastille they fill a room that contains a merchant with exploding enemies that can result in accidentally killing said merchant.
Much like level design, boss design has always been an important part of a Souls game and Dark Souls 2 struggles massively in that regard.
Most of the bosses in Dark Souls 2 are just a variation of big dude in armour. In series that contains enemies like Seath the Scaleless, the Gaping Dragon and pretty much everything in Bloodborne a game full of dudes in armour was never going to cut it.
Many of Dark Souls 2’s bosses are recycled or rehashes of bosses from Dark Souls. The Royal Rat Authority is just a worse Sif, The Old Dragon Slayer is a worse Ornstein, Scorpioness Najka is just Quelaag with a scorpion for a butt. Dark Souls 2 even recycles it’s own bosses making you fight the Dragon Rider again as well. There feels like there is a preference for having more bosses rather than good or interesting bosses.
Mechanically most of the bosses in Dark Souls 2 are not very interesting. Their move set is usually limited to an overhead smash, gap closing attack, simple 2–3 attack combo and an AOE attack. This makes the fights boring it often feels like you are fighting the same boss over and over just with different skins.
Similarly many of the bosses in Dark Souls 2 are simply battles of attrition. The bosses simply have huge amounts of health and defence and hit like freight trains but have very simple move sets. Thus you have to spend an hour slowly chipping away at their health while trying not to get killed in one hit. This is not good boss design for any game never mind a Souls game.
There are way too many boss fights with multiple enemies: either multiple bosses or bosses with mobs helping. Dark Souls is a series that is designed to work best when you fight only one enemy at a time and thus putting the player in a tiny boss arena with multiple enemies at once makes the fights very frustrating. This also turns many of the boss fights into a slog as you are forced to take single swings at one of them when there are tiny openings because you have to account for multiple bosses.
Speaking of boss fights being frustrating Dark Souls 2 has a real problem with false difficulty. Dark Souls as a series has a reputation of being hard but fair but Dark Souls 2 tries simply to be hard because that is what the series is know for.
Enemies have advantages that the player doesn’t simply to make them harder. In Dark Souls it was expected that enemies with similar equipment to the player had similar behaviour with similar poise and damage. In Dark Souls 2 enemies have far more poise, damage and i-frames than the player at the same level seemingly for the sake of being more difficult rather than being fun.
Mobs are easier to aggro and will follow the player for much longer. This makes them much harder to simply run past when you are trying to kill the boss as well as making them more difficult to lure into the one-on-one combat that the game is designed around.
The tracking is ridiculously aggressive with most enemies able to do full 360 turns while attacking. This means that you will never really feel safe to attack even from behind as you might still be hit by an attack you thought that you were safe from.
The hit detection in Dark Souls 2 is stupidly broken with enemy weapons seemingly 5x wider and slightly longer than they actually are so you will be taking hits even when you shouldn’t. Combine this with the aggressive tracking and you will never feel safe attacking because you are going to be hit by bullshit.
Dark Souls 2 also has a very weak story. While it has decent lore and the cycle of light and dark is a good addition to the lore and series however the plot is very weak.
The player has very little motivation to do anything and basically advances through the game because they want to finish it. Let’s have a quick look at the plot. You go to Drangleic to find a cure for being Undead. Then you get told to find the king. Why? Because the Emerald herald told us to. Does the king have the cure? Who knows? Is the cure even important still? Also who knows? Then we go to the castle but the king isn’t there and the queen tells us to look for the king too. You find the king, who has gone hollow (so much for a cure although that isn’t important anymore) so we go and talk to a dragon. The dragon tells us to go into the memories of some giants. You do that which makes the queen angry so you kill her and take the throne. All of this happens basically because that is where the game wants to end and it took the shortest possible route to get there.
There feels like there is a distinct lack of characters in Dark Souls 2. While Dark Souls had a bunch of fun and interesting characters like Patches, Lautrec, Solaire, Big Hat, Siegmeyer and Oscar all have interesting parallel stories to The Chosen Undead and they feel like they are part of the world. Even the characters that make up the bosses such as Gwyn, Quelaag, Artorias, Priscilla and Seath all have their own history and motivations. These characters fill out the world and make it feel like a real place. With the exception of the Emerald Herald most of the characters in Dark Souls 2 feel like they are there out of obligation. The game needs merchants, bosses and summons so that is all the NPCs are in Dark Souls 2; gameplay necessities. A result of this is that the world of Dark Souls 2 feels a lot emptier and barren.
While there are some good additions to the lore in Dark Souls 2 it feels like the lore is overly obscure but lacking depth. Dark Souls lore feels open to interpretation where many parts of the story could have many possible outcomes or implications but there is also enough background to make informed theories. Dark Souls 2 feels like a pale imitation by comparison because the lore feels too vague. Instead of building a believable and deep world Dark Souls 2 feels like it asks questions that we could never answer.
The tone of Dark Souls 2 is also off. The Soulsborne games have a tone of bleak oppression but are ultimately positive and about overcoming difficulties and the positives associated with it. Many people feel that Dark Souls is an allegory for overcoming depression and I can totally see that. Dark Souls 2 sort of misses this mark and instead just focuses on the bleak oppression. Quotes like “Like a moth drawn to a flame, your wings will burn in anguish. Time after time. For that is your fate. The fate of the cursed.” are littered throughout the game making your efforts feel futile rather than uplifting.
Dark Souls 2 goes through a lot of effort to rework some of the mechanics of Dark Souls but either gets them wrong or doesn’t fully utilise them.
The addition of the agility stat is probably one of Dark Souls 2’s biggest mistakes. Agility affects the speed at which your character does things as well as your i-frames. This creates a problem where early on your character feels sluggish and unresponsive. Then as you play through the game and start improving your agility stat your character starts becoming inconsistent so your muscle memory will always feel slightly off. It is only once you have reached the end game that you start feeling comfortable with your character and by then it is too late for most people.
Dark Souls 2 mess with the Estus flask and added additional healing items. The Estus flask system was absolutely perfect for Dark Souls’ risk vs reward design. Due to their limited and valuable nature it forced the player to think about their use. Do they use one that they won’t get maximum value out of them to be safe or do they risk running around with lower health until they can get the full heal out of a use of the flask? If you have some/all of your Estus do you push on to the next bonfire or do you retreat and try again? The additional healing items available in Dark Souls 2 take away a lot of this decision making because you can just pop one of your many health gems if you need a little bit of extra health or if you run out of Estus. This hurt the game because it never felt like you were in much danger.
Lots of people do not like the addition of the Soul Memory mechanic as it made PvP a huge hassle. Originally designed as a way to players from abusing the PvP mechanics by getting late game gear at a low level and proceeding to bully new players. The Soul Memory mechanic instead made it so that people who only wanted to play the PvP would often get forced out of the PvP range because their Soul Memory was too high.
Dark Souls 2 also implemented the Extinction mechanic. The Extinction mechanic is a system in which you can only kill each enemy in Dark Souls 2 a certain number of times before they stop respawning. This mechanic goes entirely against Dark Souls try-try-try-try again design philosophy because it means that if you mess up and lose a bunch of souls those souls are never coming back. This adds a ticking clock feeling on top of the already high stress gameplay which many people didn’t like.
Dark Souls 2 launched with severe balance issues. Some builds were much, much stronger than others which meant that they were the only viable builds in PvP until everything got rebalanced. This meant that people who played the game at launch got upset that they couldn’t play in the way that they wanted.
In summary Dark Souls 2 is hated because of an over-hyped but under-delivered launch of a game that felt like a watered down version of its predecessor that was full of bad design decisions. All of this was delivered to one of the most notoriously difficult to please communities in all of gaming who reacted about as well as you would expect.

Smith & Wesson Extreme Ops SWA24S 7.1in S.S. Folding Knife with 3.1in

Reply

Hadley · Answer

I wouldn't say that's it's bad. It's actually praised quite a bit for it's length and pacing. The only thing I didn't like is the death penalty and how most of the locations didn't connect logically. Other than that it actually wasn't a bad game. This is one I actually come back to quite often.

Athena · Answer

I am something of a connoisseur of the dark souls games, and I’ve completed each one at least a few times.
However, what really gives me a unique opinion is that my first game in the series was Dark Souls 2.
This is significant because I believe that a large amount of the dislike of ds2 from the community is borne from an immense love of the first game, fantastic as it is, and a disappointment that the second was different in many ways. The fact that I didn’t play ds1 before 2 makes me immune to seeing the game through “nostalgia glasses”, and allows me to view it objectively and as it’s own game.
There are definitely other problems with the game that make it, probably, objectively the weakest in the series. These include the ADP stat, which affects rolling invulnerability frames and estus flask consumption. The game also has some hitbox issues.
A popular thing that I have heard dark souls players say about ds2 is “it is an excellent game, but not a great souls game”. They mean that while it is (at least in their view) the worst in the series, it is still better than most triple A titles nowadays.
I will finish by saying that I love all three dark souls games, each for unique reasons as I actually think each game is very different from each other, despite them being part of the same series.
Hope this answer helped.

Ashe94 · Answer

The developers put too much unrefined content for it to be good. It’s true that it had a lot of potential that was sadly forsaken in the third chapter, but the many flaws made it not such an enjoyable experience overall. Even worse if you consider that the other entries are proper gems!
The most relevant issues to me are as follows:
Uneccessarily clunky and defective controls: the game is just so unresponsive that even Dark Souls 1 seems a product from 10 years in the future. No matter how much you’ll power up your agility, you’ll still need a ludicrous amount of time to drink a sip of estus, making healing far too punitive especially in the early stages. The game isn’t fair due to farfetched hit-boxes(you’ll range incomprehensible misses from critical hits to opponent swings that cover 270 degrees even if the animation suggests 180 max, inconsistent damage, wall blocking your attacks far worse than in other games, in consistent staggers or reaction of the opponents, camera issues worse than in the other entries…I could go over for a very long time!) and worthless movement on which we’ll come later on.
Sensless maps: It’s a fact that this game is an artistic treinwreck and not a single location holds its own to any of the first game, the third or Bloodborne: not even the biggest fan of this entry will be able to tell you otherwise. Personally I don’t care much, because the game to me still manages to be pleasing and immersive. However the actual design is pretty bad: from how different locations are linked to each other(infamous the elevator taking you from a barren toxic peak to a sea of lava…) to the position of enemies, bonfires, bosses and especially the damn holes everywhere in the late game, where you can literally fall off unless you keep the camera looking from above. The point should be using the torch which is prominent in this game, but this penalises certain fighting styles such as holding a two handed weapon. Some will also tell you that whether the first chapter was designed as a circle with excellent links between the main hub and the rest of the world, this one’s hub is literally placing 3 corridors at your disposal, one of which is locked and there is also a risk of remaining stuck since the consumable that you need to open the path(which is mandatory to conclude the game) is pretty rare in the early stages and can be used for many other purposes!
Lame Boss Fights: Most of the bosses in the base game are humanoid-like monsters of varying sizes holding a big weapon that they swing for 120 degrees, have a direct powerful hit and a 3 hit combo that can track if you don’t avoid it properly. It’s clear that they didn’t want to replicate the gimmicky nature of the first game bosses, but they clearly did not succeed: just be close to them and walk around their side, if you notice a second hit, roll, hit once(or twice if you have a quick weapon) or heal, repeat the process.
The game is not challenging, just poorly balanced: many had a frustrating experience with this game(me included), especially early game because fundamentals are way less rewarded than in the other series entries. What is instead priceless is knowledge, details that you can’t know unless you’ve been reading an article on weapon, armor performances, where to find the gear and how to best equip it(which actually makes the game a walk in the park!). Unfortunately this is a pretty valid point for map design too, going forward you might think: “Yikes, I died because I didn’t know that if I entered this room there would have beeen 20 spiders attacking me from behind! Here there are 5 zombie pirates ready to carve me up if I fall down this hole! etc.”. There is nothing wrong with trial and error but in this game it is a core principle and therefore totally frustrating. Other meaningful details can be recapped in how certain bonfires are so far off the bosses that if you get one shotted you’ll have to pass through a whole area infested by enemies. Ultimately the game doesn’t reward you for playing well and the growth system is another latent example: if you don’t know that by boosting adaptability you’ll be making movement slightly better, you’ll be up for salty times. However if you do so, your character of course will have less power, stamina or health!
I could have gone developing this list a bit more and I just realised I didn’t even touch the story, which is however not too bad in my opinion. After all being said I still think it is a decent game with a lot of content(if I was to evaluate it, I’d say 7- out of 10, whilst the other DS and Bloodborne are at least 8.5 to 9.5/10 depending on the chapter) but the above flaws are far too great for me to consider it as a good instalment in the series.

Claire · Answer

Lots of things, hit boxes are absolutely terrible, gang squads rain down on you at every turn, nonsense story, forgettable NPCs, you can’t really grind since after killing an enemy 10x they don’t respawn and while the bosses are all easy the path to them is littered with dozens of enemy clusters that you can not separate without alerting the others. Honestly the game is a train wreck, the creator was working on bloodborne at the time and that is why it was so bad. There are many many video on YouTube of people showcasing the myriad of flaws in the game and I would recommend you watch before you waste your time. I have beaten demon souls, dark souls 1 & 3 and bloodborne all on Ng+7 but I felt dark souls two was just a slog, I couldn’t even finish the dlc because I just did not care, I went right for the final boss and felt relief and empty since I wanted to like it. Many fans of the game will try to dispell the overwhelming criticism of them game, one I see a lot are the tried and true “people don’t like change” or “well you had it in your head from the beginning it was bad and it ruined the experience”. People do like change but only when it’s for the better, and if the game was good you would enjoy it and no amount of self talk can deter your natural inclination to enjoy something. A quick comparison from my personal life was when the dark knight came out, I had it in my head there was no way Heath Ledger could top Jack Nicholson’s Joker but you know what, I was wrong. If something is good you will like it, plain and simple. I would advise anyone curious about the obvious faults of dark souls two to refer to YouTube since many players have recorded many instances for viewing and it will show you what I mean in ways text can’t. At the end of the day it’s your choice, you may love it so if your a huge fan of the series I’d say go for it but if it’s your first souls game go for dark souls 3 or bloodborne. Those two are the most refined but dark souls one is just as good as the third. Sekiro is also pretty good but it’s definitely the hardest one of the bunch so far.

Zelite Infinity Damascus Chef Knife 8 Inch, Japanese Chef Knife

Reply

Kaylee · Answer

Let’s try to go through some of the reasons I hear of when listening to people criticizing DS2, and see if they are really valid.
Graphical downgrade upon release
This, IMO, is a very valid criticism. If you look at the pre-release promo material, the games graphics are significantly better than what they turned out to be. Of course, there was apparently a reason for it, and this is not uncommon for triple A titles, but there is not excuse for it.
Scholar of the first sin re-release
This criticism is a mixed bag.
On the one hand, I really like what they did with the SOTFS, mixing up enemy locations (making it more difficult), and making game progression less dependent on those anti-petrification flowers (i forgot what they were called) so that you are free to go after whichever one of the three bosses (lost sinner, the rotten, Dukes dear freja) first and in whatever order you choose, making progression less linear.
On the other hand, it is priced so ridiculously that it just feels like a money grub.
The game is designed linear and is not as good as in DS1
Although SOTFS deals with the linearity (to a certain extent)1, the game design and layout is definitely not that good. With Majula at the center of operations and over-reliance on an abundance of bonfires rather than shortcuts, the game definitely feels ‘arcady’ rather than immersive.
The game has a cheap notion of ‘difficulty’, relying solely on outnumbering the player
Ok, so here is where the whiny DS1 scrubs just need to git gud. Look, yes DS2 certainly has much more mob rushes than DS1, but you know what? It also makes some things easier. You see, if you pay attention to the regular mobs in DS2, you will notice that they DO NOT HAVE ANY LUNGING ATTACKS. This is done for a reason. If there is a large mob of enemies that can’t lunge at you, it makes it significantly easier to kite and juke them. If you approach DS2 with the ‘sword-and-board’, ‘block-then-hit-while-locked-on’ mindset and refuse to dodge away and juke the mob, they will punish you for it. Additionally, the ADP skill is often criticised, but if you pump it up to 20, dodging becomes SIGNIFICANTLY easier than in the other titles. Lastly, you should take note that weapons (both yours and the enemies’) swing slower than in the other titles. This is also done as a counter measure to mob-rushes.
In my first playthrough, I had a claymore-greatshield build. Inevitably i struggled. Sure, i finished the game, but it didn’t go smoothly. On my next build, I used a rapier and learnt how to dodge, juke, kite, and parry (a.k.a. ‘got gud’), and when i learned how to do that, the game was a cakewalk.
They often say ‘DS1 was made without difficulty in mind, and DS2 was made just for difficulty’, I say: ‘no, both were made to be difficult, but different kinds of difficulty. So get your adaptability up, not only in-game but in-life as well!’
The game has no interesting characters
I would disagree, people like Lucatiel of Mirrah, Benhart of Jugo, Creighton and Pate, and Royal sorcerer Navlan are very interesting characters.
There are too many humanoid enemies
Although this criticism is valid at face-value, it really is a matter of preference. I didn’t mind fighting mostly-humanoid enemies.
To conclude, ‘git gud, scrub’

Genesis · Answer

Ds2 sucks because the man who invented dark souls, demons souls and bloodbone.
Did. Not. Participate.
At all.
Imagine buying a da Vinci painting but DaVinci didn’t paint it. Or a Ferrarri made by Ford. The very things that made you love that brand or object, cannot be replicated by outside sources. One might argue that fromsoft isn’t just Miyazak, but I’d argue that dark souls is. Without him, you get terrible hitbkoxs, wepaons that degrade tied to framerates, invisible enemies that one shot you even if you play smart. Essentially Git Gud became, prepare to die. And thats not what dark souls is supposed to be.

Elliana · Answer

1. Insufficient movement fluency and movement design problems. The powerful design of the weapon action gives people a sense of reality, which is far more than the previous two generations. The process of weapon waving should involve the mobilization of the whole body, the accumulating force of the muscles, and the acceleration of the weapon itself; if this is not done well, the problem will not only be the visual discomfort, but also the increase in difficulty. When the weapon movements of the character and the enemy conform to the physical logic, then even the first contact can dodge the attack by feeling; but the second generation is not the case, in many cases it can only be dodged by the complete familiarity of the movement.
2. The level of character “forming” is too high, making it impossible to fight freely when experiencing the game flow for the first time. The first generation of Black Soul’s spells and shadows are too strong, which makes high-level routines less; the third generation can complete the characters in a week, so the PVP is mostly concentrated at level 120; however, the PVP of the second generation characters is concentrated in a few hundred Level, it is precisely because the goal level of 1 week can not let people use technical combat, this kind of design invisibly increases the difficulty of the novice to get started. This is another level compared to the difficulty of Dark Soul 1.
3. Too biased in the planning and design of the enemy. It is specifically embodied as follows: For the mobs with simple actions, increase their number; for the BOSS with simple actions, increase their damage. I feel a bit unbearable for this design. The increase in difficulty should be more diverse, not through the number of monsters. Not only that, most of the mobs in Soul 2 have fatal damage, and the result is that the protagonist is forced to use cute tactics to kill the enemy, which greatly reduces the combat experience.

Arianna · Answer

My first FromSoft game was Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin and I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the lore, I liked the mechanics…I know that a lot of people who invaded in DS didn’t like how it worked but I actually prefer the soul memory method because I always felt competitive in PVP.
Honestly it is a great game but people I guess who really enjoyed Dark Souls didn’t like the changes.
My FromSoft order was : DS2, Bloodborne, DS3, Dark Souls Remastered then Sekiro and given that playing order I naturally found Dark Souls incredibly easy to the point of being banal.
Anyway if you picked up the games recently I definitely recommend DS2 as you won’t have issues with the mechanics not being what you’re used to and it has really good build variety to play around with.

Amaya · Answer

Dark Souls 2 like many other controversial games got off to a bad start due to being downgraded from the trailers and demos. In marketing material for Dark Souls 2 the game looked a lot better and had very good lighting engine. … People take poorly to being lied to and deceived so Dark Souls 2 got off to a bad start. Also, yeah Dark Souls 2 is pretty easy if you level up too much and they make it way too easy to level to super high levels way to early. It definitely gets harder later, especially the DLC. A lot of the bosses are pretty easy though and that doesn’t really change until the DLC. Tanya Sanchez

Victorinox Fibrox Pro Knife, 8-Inch Chef’s FFP, 8 Inch, Black

Reply

Ivy · Answer

I think people hated it before the SOTFS and DLC pack. SOTFS DLC was the challenging one for me. People complain about boss designs, few felt plain such as the rat bosses but look at Sinh. It has a spear sticking out of its heart. How badass is that?

HENCKELS 8-pc Steak Knife Set

Reply

Kylie97 · Answer

It,s a really good game.Well in terms of lore,locations and storytelling.However the difficulty was unrelenting and not to mention when i moved from PS3 to PS4 .That version had changes that actually increased the difficulty level.I must have gone through three controllers by the end of it.

Gerber Gear 22-48485 Paraframe Mini Pocket Knife, 2.2 Inch Fine Edge Blade

Reply

Athena · Answer

Because it wasn’t actually the second Dark Souls, it was a game with the name Dark Souls and similar mechanics. Another reason the denizens of the internet seem to dislike it was that it lacked the world details that the beginning of DS1 had.

CJRB CUTLERY Folding Knife Crag

Reply

Liliana · Answer

It’s not bad. At all.
Its a great game that the online souls community likes to gang up on and sheep clammer together and claim its trash when its objectively not so.
I think a lot of people are thrown off by it because its a lot different than DS1, which is an amazing game itself. DS2 is a lot harder than DS1, especially SotFS.
Does it have issues? I mean, yes? Every game has issues, everyone has issues, and everything has issues. DS1 has issues and I consider it maybe the best game I have ever played.
Play it. Trust me.

sheca · Answer

I’m not sure I hate it, but I certainly disliked it and thought it was incredibly overrated. Here’s why, in the form of thoughts I had from start to finish.
Oh, cool, I can get it for PC now. Let’s see what this is about.
Oh, they haven’t updated the tutorial for PC… everything is in terms of an XBox controller, so I’m forced to go through menus in order to figure out what the controls are. That’s…. incredibly lazy and tells me they don’t care about the game.
The controls feel really sluggish, why does it take so long for my character to react when I do something?
Oh, apparently it’s because I was foolish enough to think as a PC player I could use the mouse. Turns out mouse commands have a delay on all actions.
There’s a fix available, but it involves autohotkey. Capcom never bothered to fix it. I also didn’t find it at the time, so was unable to overcome the problem.
Fine, I’ve been meaning to get a controller anyways, I’ll get one for this game.
At this point, I put the game on hold until I had the controller. Going back in I was already incredibly unimpressed… this was a major game from a major company, and so far what I had seen indicated a complete lack of QC or interest in the game.
Ok, so now we’re back in the game, and the tutorial makes sense. I’m navigating the world properly, and my character is reacting when I tell him to.
Character still feels kinda sluggish…. but now at least I can tell it’s intentional.
Oh, hey, I died… well, we expected that from the rep. Time to respawn and try again.
Okay, so far it seems a lot of the difficulty is old-school Trial & Error… you’re expected to die so you learn how not to die next time. Fair enough.
Oh, those things are big… and have a lot of health. I don’t see another way to go, so let’s try that. Maybe I”ll use some items.
So, when you die the enemies come back, but the items don’t. That seems…. awkward. Lesson learned, items are worthless because they’re not going to be available ever again.
Well, I finally took down that big guy…. that wasn’t terribly enjoyable. That was mostly annoying, and my immediate sensation was “do I have to do that again?”
Oh, look, there’s another one. I know how to kill him now, but it wasn’t even fun the first time, let’s look around elsewhere.
Oh, my weapon is about to break? Do I have another one? Yes, but that’s an annoying little wrinkle. Can I repair? If I can I don’t know how.
Ok, I haven’t enjoyed any aspect of this game so far, and if I want old-school “die and die again” gameplay I’ll just play some of the old-school games that did it well. This isn’t worth it, is my play time short enough to return it?

Guess not. Oh well,back to something fun.

Forged Viking Knives, Husk Chef Knife Butcher Knives Handmade Fishing

Reply

Hailey · Answer

I think the main reason is that it’s not the first game. Like in movies, also in games, the sequel is usually ranked worse. You can see how they tried to fix this with DS3. DS3 copies way too many things from DS1. Still people prefer DS3 over DS2. So it’s mostly about expectations and first impression. If you wait something to be good, usually it’s bad. If you wait something to be bad, it’s usually better than you expected.
I think DS2 is not bad at all. It has really cool areas and it’s different from DS1, which is a good thing. It is also the longest and the hardest one. DS3 is copy of DS1 with few exceptions. I also prefer 1 stage bosses over 2 stage bosses, which is the main reason I prefer DS2 over DS3.

Genesis · Answer

I just have say this out loud… Most people who didn’t like Dark Souls 2 DID NOT start by playing Demon’s Souls. And most people who absolutely love Dark Souls 3 ONLY joined the Dark Souls bandwagon AFTER it became popular. I love each game for its own merits but as someone who has played them all from the very beginning: Dark Souls 3 was the most disappointing and dissatisfying game in the entire series. They released it waaay too early to YouTubers making it nigh impossible to not already know the first third or half of the game before picking it up. The game was an obvious directorial takeover by Myazaki over the guy who did Dark Souls 2. I will ALWAYS remember the hype of the Dark Souls 2 Trailer. Was it an unnecessary and corporate motivated project?? Yes!!! But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t have done it! Remember if Myazaki had his way there NEVER would have been a Dark Souls 2. He didn’t want to do a sequel! And it really really shows! In how uninspired and rip-off like the third game is. I mean I just can’t understand people who defend Dark Souls backstab fest pvp. Demon’s Souls was better than that! It took real skill and speed to master PVP! Not knowledge of glitchy flawed game mechanics!
So I’m summary, I think the reason why people deride on Dark Souls 2 Soo much is simply because most people are sheep who cannot think for themselves and decide to join the hate clan, only to later make flipping apology videos (which at least 3 souslbourne YouTubers have done now) on the internet only when popular opinion seems to away one way or another.
True intelligence doesn’t change its mind.
I don’t mind criticism of Dark Souls 2. I love it actually! If I could I would make a modded version of the game to address every single issue! Because the game engine, graphics, and stability of DSII SOTFS are far superior to anything else they have released.
This is a Love Rant to all the King’s Field and Demon’s Souls fans out there. The true fans who don’t change sides of an argument simply because their peers pressured them into it!
Let’s make Drangelic great again! Mod It!!!

What makes

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Kitchen knife skills: how come when halving an apple or some other item by pulling the knife towards the hand holding the item, chefs d

Why are fish knifes shaped differently from other types of knives?