The 'Dark Souls'-approach to gaming bothers me

[Alessan]

@Kobal2

Spoken like a man whose eyes have never lain on a single page from Finnegan’s Wake scoff

As a rule, people who read Joyce are also capable of spelling the words “get” and “good”.

[Kobal2]

@Alessan

As a rule, people who read Joyce are also capable of spelling the words “get” and “good”.

I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.

(FINE it’s Ulysses)

[Asympotically_fat]

@dzeiger

Watching through runs of the various Souls games via Twitch or Youtube or whatever, I get the whole “try, fail, try again, fail a little better, keep improving until you succeed” bits in terms of the general gameplay, but it seems to go a little overboard with the “quest/storyline” stuff. Like if you want to complete Onion Bro’s story, there’s a point where he will die if you don’t make some preparations ahead of time, and I don’t think there’s any real warning that you have to do something before you talk to him.

So, if you’re not looking at a guide, you’ll probably fail first time, but he won’t reset if you die, you’re just out of luck until your next playthrough. Running back through a group of mobs everytime you fail to kill a boss is one thing, running through 2/3 of the game to get to a certain quest point seems quite another.

There’s an area with a boss (Painted World of Ariamis) in DS1 that you would be pretty lucky to find without a guide. In the DS3 DLC, there’s boss that is hidden behind n invisble wall in a passage way that is accessed by jumping off a moving lift. However these are all optional and not vital to the plot and won’t hamper your progress. DS1 and DS3 are rarelyr unfair, in PvE at least.

Having so many obscure elements,that you don’t really need to know about to complete the game, to me adds a kind of depth as it feels like theres always more going on than meets the eye. I bet for example, I could tell even the most seasoned players an intentional game mechanic for DS3 they weren’t aware of.

[Kobal2]

@Asympotically_fat

There’s an area with a boss (Painted World of Ariamis) in DS1 that you would be pretty lucky to find without a guide.

The Painted World is a lot easier to find than Gwyndolin. I mean, the crow is huge and it already took you somewhere…

[Asympotically_fat]

@Kobal2

The Painted World is a lot easier to find than Gwyndolin. I mean, the crow is huge and it already took you somewhere…

I think Painted World is harder to find, though whilst I think of it, finding the DLC area without a guide is not a given.

[Asympotically_fat]

Also for those DS3 players here is a mechanic you probably don’t know about. IF someone hits you with a fully-charged heavy from a** broken** Astoria ultragreatsword whilst you are blocking with a rapier you get a block animation that I’ve not seen in normal play. It can probaboly be done with different weapons as I’m not sure of the exact conditions to produce it.

[Busy_Scissors]

@Asympotically_fat

I think Painted World is harder to find, though whilst I think of it, finding the DLC area without a guide is not a given.

Do you know how the DLC access worked on release? It would be, dare I say, quite Dark Souls if you got the DLC and then had to spend 6 hours searching for the front door.
Although I guess it just takes one person to find it nowadays and it is instantly disseminated.

That certainly sounds like an obscure animation in DS3. Did you discover that playing yourself? One in DS that I don’t see often is that kicking with a jagged ghost blade doesn’t give you a kick, instead you do a cool sort of half back flip and slash.

This might be common knowledge but I v rarely kick in pvp as it’s too easy to fluff on a console controller.

[Dark_Sponge]

I found the Painted World on accident on my very first playthrough. I don’t think I would have ever found the DLC without some help.

[Asympotically_fat]

@Busy_Scissors

Do you know how the DLC access worked on release? It would be, dare I say, quite Dark Souls if you got the DLC and then had to spend 6 hours searching for the front door.
Although I guess it just takes one person to find it nowadays and it is instantly disseminated.

That certainly sounds like an obscure animation in DS3. Did you discover that playing yourself? One in DS that I don’t see often is that kicking with a jagged ghost blade doesn’t give you a kick, instead you do a cool sort of half back flip and slash.

This might be common knowledge but I v rarely kick in pvp as it’s too easy to fluff on a console controller.

I think you basically just had to wait until someone found the DLC and posted it online.

Kicking with some curved swords is replaced with a backflip animation (in DS3 its the curved swords with the fast R1 that have it, I don’t know DS1 as well) and kicking with a thrusting sword is replaced by a backstep animation, it’s the same in DS3. It’s a mechanic you could play hundreds of hours and easily miss, but certainly hardcore PVP player knows about. Tbh though the normal kick is mcuh more useful in PvP.

Someone showed me the Astora GS trick, but I’ve never seen it otherwise in many thousand of hours of play (I’ve played DS3 a lot - I recently worked out I must’ve beaten Darkeater Midir over 1000 times and that fight alone takes at least 10 minutes to win!). Never seen it mentioned on Youtube or reddit either.

[Jragon]

Everyone who was paying attention to the DLC leadup knew where it was because they flat out put the location in the trailer. The only missing piece was a new item on a new non-respawning enemy in the Duke’s Archives whose description made it clear that’s what it was related to. They may have flat out spelled out the steps in pre-release stuff, to be honest, I don’t remember it being a mystery at all.

By far the most cryptic bullshit in a Soulslike game, including Sekiro, is easily the two hidden areas in 3. One requiring the leap of logic that using an emote can actually trigger something and the other being behind I believe two invisible walls that are not telegraphed at all. (Granted I didn’t play online, online that place was probably littered with soapstone messages giving it away). I guess by that metric Ash Lake counts too.

You could make an argument some of the covenants are also super cryptic, but a lot of that is due to the fact some of them, er, don’t work as intended. Especially in 1.

Souls games are neat because their atmosphere, structure, and crypticness makes it feel like there’s just one more hidden secret even though they’ve been datamined so thoroughly that’s functionally impossible. It reminds me of the old days of game rumors like the Triforce in Ocarina of Time.

[hogarth]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

It’s not so much that it’s hard. I’m used to games being hard—for me, anyway. To me, the problem is that there doesn’t really seem to be any way to avoid dying all the time. The only strategy, it seems, to deal with difficult monsters is to keep dying until you get it right, either by accident, or by finally figuring out the precise combination of dodges, attacks, counterattacks and whatnot to prevail.

I’m also not a big fan of Dark Souls, but I very much enjoyed the games Shadows of Mordor and Shadows of War which are based on the cycle of fight/die/repeat.

1. The games feel less repetitive because the enemies will refer to past events and they will engage in their own activities rather than just silently standing around waiting for the player to respawn.

2. It’s easier to stack the odds of beating a particular enemy in the player’s favour by exploiting specific weaknesses or gathering allies.

3. There are no stupid mandatory platforming sections (which I personally dislike).

[Kobal2]

@Asympotically_fat

Kicking with some curved swords is replaced with a backflip animation (in DS3 its the curved swords with the fast R1 that have it, I don’t know DS1 as well) and kicking with a thrusting sword is replaced by a backstep animation, it’s the same in DS3. It’s a mechanic you could play hundreds of hours and easily miss, but certainly hardcore PVP player knows about. Tbh though the normal kick is mcuh more useful in PvP.

PvE too. In DS1 the spearmen enemies are designed to be kicked about, and they’re a pain to bait out with scimitar/rapier.

But in that vein : scimitar (and I believe rapier too ? But not estoc) held in the left hand can do a parry on L2 which has a very funky timing : the parry window is much shorter than that of even a non-dedicated parry shield, but it opens up quite a bit faster than even a buckler which, depending on who you are, either :
a) makes it utterly useless because your muscle-memory timings get all fucked up and you consistently eat sword when you try to be all fancy, or
b) makes unpredictable split-second reactive parries possible in PvP. All the more so in DS2 where it’s not unusual to tool around with a pair of 1H weapons which you can toggle to work as “pair” or “2 singles” very quickly and it’s not immediately visible that you did, especially if you did it mid-roll.

[Kobal2]

@Asympotically_fat

I think Painted World is harder to find, though whilst I think of it, finding the DLC area without a guide is not a given.

Finding the Painted World blind is basically a question of “have you figured out you could go back to the Asylum before going to Anor Londo, y/n ?” because the painting is otherwise super conspicuous so it’s almost a given players are going to want to check it out.

In my opinion any explore-y player worth their salt will figure out that they can roll off the church => firelink paternoster and will be curious what there is on that very conspicuous platform/ceiling ; the only “not a given” thing is that the jump to the buttress opposite is kind of finicky and precise (also jumping at all in DS1 is a luck-based endeavour) and if you flub it a couple times you might conclude that it’s not doable at all by design or there’s an invisible wall or something (but IIRC there are some glowies on the roof to clue you in ? It’s been a while)