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[s0]

i do feel the urge to replay it because it's just a freaking good game and i love the world and level design. i've played through it 6 or 7 times so far with different characters and weapons. a big factor for me is that there are no bad levels, like lost izalith or demon's souls world 5-2. dark souls 2 is overlong.

like, with the other souls games i like replaying them of course (which is actually rare for me with videogames), but there are always things in them where i'm like "i don't really wanna do THAT again". with bloodborne i don't have that.

[Thomas Finch]

I feel like Bloodborne is a masterpiece. It's perfect in nearly every way for me. The chalice dungeons are meh, but they're just additional. I actually like them more than most people just because it gives me more bloodborne to play. I could see myself replaying the game many times mainly because the biggest part of the fun for me is the combat and it hasn't gotten stale yet.

[DJFloppyFish]

like, with the other souls games i like replaying them of course (which is actually rare for me with videogames), but there are always things in them where i'm like "i don't really wanna do THAT again". with bloodborne i don't have that.

this is very true for me as well. ive tried to go back to dark souls 1 and 2 both but i ended going back to bloodborne on both occasions. everything in bloodborne is such high quality that i don't mind repeating the same playstyle, it's fun every time.

i think the build variety complaints are valid, but the degree to which it hurts the game is overblown imo. fighting even the most basic of enemies in bloodborne is the best combat in the series.

[Glyph]

I agree with how exceptional bborne is in general, except maybe the start of Nightmare of Mensis and the Micolash fight. Very short parts altogether, though. It's hard to even say what my favorite area is since they're all very good and flow into each other well.

[Dinghai]

like, with the other souls games i like replaying them of course (which is actually rare for me with videogames), but there are always things in them where i'm like "i don't really wanna do THAT again". with bloodborne i don't have that.

this is very true for me as well. ive tried to go back to dark souls 1 and 2 both but i ended going back to bloodborne on both occasions. everything in bloodborne is such high quality that i don't mind repeating the same playstyle, it's fun every time.

i think the build variety complaints are valid, but the degree to which it hurts the game is overblown imo. fighting even the most basic of enemies in bloodborne is the best combat in the series.

I'll offer an additional agreement. Weapons having unique play styles with tons of moves helps. Gotta treat that trick system.

[Thomas Finch]

Dark Souls 3 - Opening Cutscene:




I'm betting the Abyss Watchers are using replicas of Artorias' Greatsword and they're following in his footsteps. Hope they're a covenant and I can get the Abyss Greatsword.

[s0]

im replaying demon's souls atm and i just realized how strange the intro cutscene really is, particularly the part where the narrator just rattles off a bunch of different npc names. like, why would a player playing the game for the first time even care?

[SousaVilla]

im replaying demon's souls atm and i just realized how strange the intro cutscene really is, particularly the part where the narrator just rattles off a bunch of different npc names. like, why would a player playing the game for the first time even care?

That's actually a very common literary technique: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Introdump

It creates expectation by making the player curious to see who are those people. It also helps to give the feeling that the world is really complex and misterious. I believe is very common in fantasy novels with secondary worlds, since the author wants you to put you in a strange world as fast as possible and create the impression that the world is "realistic", ie that it has a background of information that you're ignorant about, just like the real world. (the first chapters of "game of thrones" have this, just like the "silmarillion")

It's better when you can associate a memorable characteristic to the character other than its name. Dks1 does it better in this aspect. (you have the lighting lord/zeus figure, the fire witches, the giant skeleton, the albino dragon, etc)

(you can subvert this trope as well. In Hemingway's "the sun also rises", we hear of a bunch of minor characters in the first part that we presume will be important later. Most of them are completely ignored and new ones are introduced.)

[gimymblert]

Is darksouls 3 intro or dark krystal remake?


well let's take a pause

[Raptor85]

It's strange, although I really love Bloodborne, I don't really feel the urge to replay it. Maybe its because the game is more linear, and though the weapons all feel like they change the gameplay quite a bit, it still feels like it all has less range than Demon's Souls or Dark Souls 1 and 2. Maybe because of how combat remains fairly similar regardless of your weapon choices, it all remains more or less about staying very mobile and hitting at the right times.

I actually feel like going back to Dark Souls 1 and 2 a bit more than to bloodborne.

Maybe its because of the chalice dungeons, I played that for a while and got so bored of it, maybe it kind of poisoned the rest somehow.

I kinda feel the same way, i LOVE BloodBourne, hell, i bought a ps4 for bloodbourne, still have no other games for that system to  this day, and STILL don't regret the purchase, but it's demon's and dark souls 1 i return to play all the time still.  As great as bloodbourne is in the end all the builds play mostly the same, the  build variety from the souls games just isn't there so you can't do as much to keep the game fresh. The lack of equipment and "spells" early game especially doesn't help that.  The sheer amount of creativity you could have with your character build in dks1 just added so much to the game. The bell summoning system also REALLY sucks compared to summon signs so even though mechanically i love it's pvp and co-op it's too frustrating to get a match often.

[s0]

holy fuck, demon's souls is easy for me now. i just downed 5 bosses without even coming close to dying.  

btw it just dawned on me that the name selen vinland could be derived from the german word "seelen", meaning "souls".

[s0]

Idk why i ever thought the flamelurker was so hard. Compared to later fast bosses like artorias, manus, ludwig, orphan or even gascoigne he's a joke. add to that the incredibly OP roll. Also I like how you can stack regen effects from adjudicator's shield, regenerator ring and blessed weapon to give you insane HP regen to the point where you rarely need grasses outside of boss fights.

[TeeGee]

Regen was my fave build in Demon's Souls, and yeah, it makes the game super easy, almost to the point in which you can trade hits with bosses and come on top.

That said, I'm happy they removed it in later releases. Having infinite health removes some of that crucial sense of tension.

[s0]

I mean of course I deliberately picked a super easy build because I want to be done with the game fast. Don't really wanna spend 30+ hours on it at the moment. I guess Demon's Souls in general has huge balance issues. So many builds are just completely broken.

But otoh, this was the first game and souls is pretty nontraditional as far as action RPGs go, so there was no real precedent. Especially with the weird nonlinear progression model they used (mainly talking about distribution of soul drops) that they backed away from in later games and actually patched out of dks1. Also Souls games are just hard to balance in general because combine several seemingly contradictory things like challenge and high customizability, and stat-based vs skill-based combat. I fully expect dks3 to be less balanced than bloodborne btw.

[Dragonmaw]

i actually liked the weird progression of demon's souls drops, the only thing that i really hated was how weird the blacksmithing was. much prefer dark souls' smithing over any of the others (including BB)

[s0]

i actually liked the weird progression of demon's souls drops, the only thing that i really hated was how weird the blacksmithing was. much prefer dark souls' smithing over any of the others (including BB)

i like it because it totally flies in the face of rpg convention. The best part of playing DeS for the first time was trying to play it like a "normal" rpg and getting my ass handed to me. but it also makes a lot of parts of the game unsatisfying to complete and forces you to grind flying manta rays if u dont wanna be underleveled for ng+. so in this case the more traditional approach just works better imo.

also dks2 had the best upgrade system. dks1 still has too many different materials to farm and in bborne the problem is that high tier bloodstones are too rare and everything costs the same to upgrade. dark souls 2 is the happy medium between those.

[FrankieSmileShow]

I think I much preferred the Dark Souls 1 approach to unlocking certain types of crafting, where you need to both find a blacksmith that can do it in the world, and find them a special ember to unlock the higher level special stuff, and figure out which blacksmith can use which ember. It makes for a very exploration-centric approach to this, very tightly restricts your options based on where you've been and how much you looked around, which seems to me like the most appropriate way to handle this for the souls series.

Finding a new character and finding some special artifact for them that just permanently unlocks a new option is a very satisfying way to open up customization possibilities.
It makes your path through a non-linear game open up very different angles for you. When options open up through single items like in Dark Souls 2, and each lets you just make one special weapon, those items need to be put all over the game, and finding them isn't really a big deal. Before long you've accumulated items of all the types and you barely noticed...

It does make things more clunky if you just want to upgrade your stuff in NG+ and beyond, since you need to move all over the world to build and customize your gear, but there could probably be some solution to this as well, such as a means of moving those blacksmiths to a central hub location if you complete their "quests". Or maybe have one special blacksmith to whom you can gift every ember, but who perhaps asks you for three times as many souls for crafting and trading. People would probably stick to the separate blacksmiths on their initial game, and go for the more pricey central blacksmith on NG+ and beyond, when souls are way devalued.

The only part I would change about the Dark Souls 1 approach, is all the various types of titanite. Its probably best to keep them simple, just having different basic tiers of titanite to block the players from upgrading their weapons too far too early, make em have to be a bit more selective about the crafting early on, but let them experiment more in the games' latter half. Maybe still keep some special craft items for special themed weapons like dragon weapons needing dragon scales, something occasional fitting a theme, but mostly keep things to generic stuff, and mostly just unlock whole upgrade branches permanently through exploration.

[s0]

but also i should add that i dislike convoluted "crafting" systems in general, so the less complicated the crafting is, the better. i actually enjoy the fact that you can't upgrade armors in demon's souls bc it means less upgrades to worry about.

[s0]

On the Progression of Skeletons in From Software's "Souls" Series:

Demon's Souls: Metal ninja skeletons that look like Yoshimitsu from Tekken 3.

Dark Souls: More conventional looking, but still pretty acrobatic.

Dark Souls 2: Normal cheesy fantasy skeleton warriors in both visual design and behavior.

Bloodborne: No skeletons.

[Tumetsu]

You just made me realize how different DkS and DS skeletons are compared to the most of the fantasy games  Never really noticed it until you pointed it out.