From Software Dark Souls 3

[Silverfish]

It's also clear From isn't that fond of DS1's design by this point either considering they want a larger feeling world in their next game and never really went back to DS1 style design. Whatever it is DS1's fanboy want, they'll never get it again. Suck it down!

TBH, even as a massive DS1 fanboy, this has proven undeniably true. That game's approach to both world design and how said world is moved through (and back, I suppose) has been so roundly ignored by the subsequent games, that I assume it was made by mistake.

 

[Lyric Suite]

I think you are making too much of the "realism" of the world.

It feels more real in relation to the other Dark Souls games, which is what i meant. But Dark Souls is still an action game and the levels are only partially devoted at making you feel like you are navigating a real place and it's more about enemy placement and every inch presenting gameplay challenges. If you wanted to go out of your way to replicate a real place you can do that, but you need to leave a lot of space where you are basically roaming without engaging anything. Kingdom Come for instance has recreated a real area as much as they could pull it off with the resources they had, but much of the space is devoted to exploration and immersion and not gameplay, and certainly not the kind of gameplay where every corner and every inch of space is devoted to some kind of challenge. Part of the reason Dark Souls feels so large on a first playthrough is precisely that every step you gain is an achievement in itself. Obviously, with enough practice you can trivialize all the challenges which is where the game starts to feel very small, but before then even a small area can feel like an adventure in itself. I mean the first time going through Blighttown felt like it was forever. At some point it felt like i was never getting out of it, but then you do and the fact you find yourself back to Firelink Shrine is amazing, except of course for when you find out the fire keeper is dead lmao le tr00 Dark Souls experience.

So, keeping in mind the kinD of game Dark Souls is, Lordran feels very much like a real place. Obviously it's not as real as it could have been if they had made an hiking simulator instead, but for what it is it remains very atmospheric not to mention impressive from a design point of view. By contrast, the linearity of DS3 just felt SOOOO underwhelming by comparison. And as for DS2, the only reason it feels larger than DS1 is because it is literally bigger, with a larger base game and of course numerous DLCs where the original only had one.

BTW, as for the DS1 style level design not coming back, i wouldn't be so sure. They say Elder Rings is "open world" but i have to take that with a massive grain of salt. I have my doubts they'll stray too far from their typical formula thus by open world they may well mean something akin to DS1. Anybody thinking they'll pull a Skyrim or a Witcher 3 (or anything related to the Ubishit conception of open world) is probably deluding themselves. It's probably just marketing, like the G.R.R. Martin shit.

 

[Lutte]

Anybody thinking they'll pull a Skyrim or a Witcher 3 (or anything related to the Ubishit conception of open world)

You have a knack at putting words into people's mouth.
I said larger and you go ahead and imply I think they're making the next skyrim.
I'm more thinking of Zelda's school of overworld design. They'll have horse riding for fuck sake, they certainly will spread areas across more than souls were used to.

 

[Lyric Suite]

We'll see, but i won't be disappointed if it just ends up being another DS/Bloodborne/Seiko variant.

 

[Gerrard]

So, keeping in mind the kinD of game Dark Souls is, Lordran feels very much like a real place

What the fuck am I reading? There is ZERO fucking realism in any of the DS games' worlds. None of it makes any sense. It's nothing but light novel level plot device "writing" with no consideration for any sort of believably.
The lorefags are autistic people.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Lordran makes perfect sense, the fuck are you talking about. You start off in an undead town right off the asylum (duh), there's a water way that's connected to the lower part of the down, there's sewers down there, across the town there's a church connected to a fortress that sends you up to a city of the gods, below that there's a garden and then down from the sewers you go down into what's essentially an infernal area and the anti-thesis to Anor Londo, which is nearer the sky. The layout is perfectly logical and consistent even from a narrative point of view. And next to the undead burg there's catacombs 'cause where else would they be. There's no "lol random" shit anywhere, every area follows the other logically.

 

[Caim]

So I've been going through the Cinders mod for Dark Souls 3 lately. It adds a shitload of weapons, armor, rings, spells, enemies, starting classes and so on to the game. One of the big changes that made magic a bit more of a hassle in DS3 is that it uses mana (or FP) instead of the Vancian system from DS1 and 2. Cinders fixes that by having your FP slowly regenerate so you won't have to rely on your Ashen Estus Flask. Something I'm not a fan of in the most recent patch is that they removed the AEF in favor of an infinite use item that restores a flat 100 FP after a few seconds. This might be useful for early game characters, but in the late game this is going to be a lot less useful.

Except when you combine this with another new mechanic, it becomes useless. Armor sets now all give you a bonus of some kind. In earlier patches these could be out there with the more unique items giving potent bonuses (the Big Hat you can buy after defeating the Crystal Sage gave you +10% FP), but now it's all very homogenized. But for every item set that gives you +10% fire resist or +8 luck, there's shit like Velka's set that restores 40 FP after killing an enemy. And given that with at least a halfway decent starting character you can kill enemies by spending less than 40 FP and that at 40 Attunement you'll have 300 FP... well, I think you see where I'm going with this. And yes, Velka's set is still found in the same place as the base game: the locked door in the sewers you need to open with the key you get from the first ashes you turn in to the merchant.

Another big revamp went to the Covenants. These are more PvE focussed and give you modest bonuses, as well as enable drops for items that you can turn in at your covenant leader for special spells, armor and cheaper titanite. A number of these items are now used to upgrade your spell implements instead of regular titanite, so you have even more of a reason to use them. And where in the base game there's a difference between all three different kinds of hexes (pyromancy, sorcery, miracles) in the current patch they can all be cast from whatever implement you want. Not sure I'm a fan of that though since it takes away having to choose what you want to focus on.

Other features include the ability to inflict curses on your game to increase enemy power, limit yourself or just spawn in more enemies, all of which increases your soul gain. And you can put those souls to good use: while Vigor, Attunement and Endurance start to give diminishing returns at 40 and especially at 60, damage scaling from Strength/Dexterity/Intelligence/Faith has no such limit and scales linerally all the way up to 99. Bosses can be respawned by using a purchasable item that costs 10% of souls you'd get from that boss so you can have another go at them, which is very useful since boss souls can now produce a lot more things: Wolnir's soul for example can now make six different things, three of which are dark pyromancies. Then there are new vendors with cleverly added written dialogue, the ability to upgrade rings to up to +5, items that let you summon a variety of allies including crabs, slugs, mimics, skeletons and even Solaire himself. Invasions by red phantoms are a lot more common, and you can also respawn the lot of them with a relatively cheap item. There's a few new minibosses as well taken from the other games, including the Dragon Rider and the Mirror Knight from Dark Souls 2. You can also fight Ornstein, Ciarian and Artorias while Gough pelts the arena with arrows as a new boss fight, and there are short unlockable enemy gauntlets to obtain rare items for weapon reinforcement.

Also the mod updates EXTREMLY regularly. Version 1.87 was released last Sunday, and I can already see that version 1.88 is almost ready. So if you like Dark Souls 3 but want more out of it, give Cinders a try. Link here: http://ds3-cinders.wikidot.com/

 

[Gerrard]

Lordran makes perfect sense, the fuck are you talking about. You start off in an undead town right off the asylum (duh), there's a water way that's connected to the lower part of the down, there's sewers down there, across the town there's a church connected to a fortress that sends you up to a city of the gods, below that there's a garden and then down from the sewers you go down into what's essentially an infernal area and the anti-thesis to Anor Londo, which is nearer the sky. The layout is perfectly logical and consistent even from a narrative point of view. And next to the undead burg there's catacombs 'cause where else would they be. There's no "lol random" shit anywhere, every area follows the other logically.

I'm not talking about geography.

 

[Silva]

I'm not talking about geography.

What are you talking about then? Because DS1 has one of the most logical settings I've seen, in that it follows logically from it's premise of an ongoing apocalypse. All regions are derelict and populated by hollow husks of the beings that used to inhabit then (plus the pilgrims who fell for the "prophecy" thing).

The whole things is so plausible, and has such a sense of place, that one feels like an archeologist unearthing the recent history of that region. It's a feeling that few games manage to get across, and not even the other Soulsborne titles do it so well as DS1. (I would argue BB comes a close second)

 

[Gerrard]

DS1 has one of the most logical settings I've seen

You kill enemies, rest at a bonfire, enemies respawn.
You kill an NPC, rest at a bonfire, they don't respawn.
Why are the NPCs there only for the sake of the player's character?

If you think any of this retarded shit is logical you have brain rot.

 

[bec de corbin]

is it ds2 where you ride an elevator in a lighthouse up and come out on a volcano?

 

[Silverfish]

You kill enemies, rest at a bonfire, enemies respawn. You kill an NPC, rest at a bonfire, they don't respawn.

Except for the Fire Keeper, of course. And Andre. And the Melentia rip-off. And Ludleth.

Why are the NPCs there only for the sake of the player's character?

Because DS3 was the fifth one of these games in seven years. Nobody (on the dev side) wanted to bother with the pretense anymore.

 

[Silva]

DS1 has one of the most logical settings I've seen

You kill enemies, rest at a bonfire, enemies respawn.
You kill an NPC, rest at a bonfire, they don't respawn.
Why are the NPCs there only for the sake of the player's character?

WTF? Tell me one story where the supporting cast is not there for the main character.

Bro, you're getting old and grumpy.

 

[Lyric Suite]

DS1 has one of the most logical settings I've seen

You kill enemies, rest at a bonfire, enemies respawn.
You kill an NPC, rest at a bonfire, they don't respawn.
Why are the NPCs there only for the sake of the player's character?

If you think any of this retarded shit is logical you have brain rot.

This is demented.

Dark Souls is an action game. The environments are realistic within the scope of the game but the developers never set out to create a perfect simulation most things are still gameplay oriented first and foremost.

But within that framework, Dark Souls 1 is remarkable logical and yes, realistic. The other Dark Souls games, not so much, or at least less so. Even the placement of NPCs makes sense in DS1 in that they don't actually exist for the player specifically and the game's story and setting actually takes other players into account as inhabitants of the word (Solaire acknowledges as such when you first meet him), and even though there's no actual interaction with other players aside for PvP or co-op boss fights the implication is that the world is as much for them as it is for you. In DS3 they throw every pretense out the window because they were obviously bored with the formula by then but that's actually part of the point given that the original argument was that DS1 felt more real or consistent than either DS2 or DS3, not that was the most realistic game ever made in and of itself.

 

[Lyric Suite]

BTW, one pertinent rebuttal to that argument is that it is actually better for realism or immersion to have areas that have no connection to one another, which would give the illusion you are only visiting certain parts of a much larger world so that the immersion is not threatened by the the actual content of the game which must invariably be limited.

Now i'd say there's some merit to this argument, but my counter point was essentially that what you experience in the game in terms of concrete interactivity IS the actual reality. Yes, sometimes implied things can help with the immersion. When i was a kid i remember stopping in my tracks to look at the skybox in Doom wondering what it would be like to visit those implied far off locations. But ultimately those things are just fluff. The "real" reality of the world of Doom is not the implied vastness of Mars or Earth but the actual levels of the game. This is why level design is important, and why modern shooters feel less "real" and yes, less immersive as a result despite the fact the graphics are far more realistic. I brought up nuDoom because that game actually felt less "real" to me than the original Doom by virtue of the fact the levels are much, much less interactive (in terms of space, as the layout is extremely basic), all they have going for it is an infinitely more sophisticated presentation which ultimately however is irrelevant because fluff is fluff no matter what.

So when it comes to Dark Souls 1, the fact Lordran is one giant level that can be experienced in a "concrete" manner makes it feel more real to me than having disconnected smaller level that imply a much larger area that one can only imagine but never actually experience.

 

[Silva]

To me, Dark Souls 1 is one of the games with one of the least immersive world because the way it is designed to make you feel like you're seeing everything of the world makes you realize how tiny the world is compared to games that abstract the world in which you may not have interconnection between maps, but the abstraction always leaves you imagining that there's more to this place.I'm only seeing this part of boletaria, there's more to boletaria" vs "I have seen everything of Lordran and by god the entire world could fit a tiny city!"

DS1 is full of references to places that you don't visit and have to use imagination/abstraction to picture: Astora, Vinheim, Catarina, etc. as much as any other entry in the series. And it does this superbly well through descriptions, visuals of weapons and equipment, and NPCs clothes and customs that point to those lands. One can totally feel the difference in culture between, say, the Great Swamp and Astora, just by examining the gear and NPCs that came from these places.

Damn, the game even hints at specific plots and historic events that happened in those places. See the mistery of the Evil Eye ring/beast, or the tales that spread among Astora noble families about the undead prophecy, or the Great Swamp naturalistic way of life in their seek for powerful pyromancies.

TL;DR: DS1 is as full of abstraction hinting at other places as any other entry in series, and perhaps was the first to do this with such a degree of excellence in a long time in the industry (I never played Demon Souls but I hear it's poor at this). This sense of place, not only geographic but in culture, lore, religion and history, this big fcking mythopoeya the game portrays, is one of the reasons it was so lauded by the whole industry.

You're full of shit, bro. Go take a bath.

 

[Black Angel]

Lordran makes perfect sense, the fuck are you talking about. You start off in an undead town right off the asylum (duh), there's a water way that's connected to the lower part of the down, there's sewers down there, across the town there's a church connected to a fortress that sends you up to a city of the gods, below that there's a garden and then down from the sewers you go down into what's essentially an infernal area and the anti-thesis to Anor Londo, which is nearer the sky. The layout is perfectly logical and consistent even from a narrative point of view. And next to the undead burg there's catacombs 'cause where else would they be. There's no "lol random" shit anywhere, every area follows the other logically.

Behold!

Spoiler

For some reason Ash Lake isn't included here. I vaguely remembered the artist actually finished this and include Ash Lake there, but maybe this is the actual finished painting and the artist can't fit Ash Lake there.
Or maybe the artist is one of the very rare few who didn't stumble upon/finds out about Great Hollow?

Also, the one thing the artist got wrong is the location of New Londo and Dark Root. They were supposed to be much, much closer.

 

[Silva]

Behold!

Spoiler

For some reason Ash Lake isn't included here. I vaguely remembered the artist actually finished this and include Ash Lake there, but maybe this is the actual finished painting and the artist can't fit Ash Lake there.
Or maybe the artist is one of the very rare few who didn't stumble upon/finds out about Great Hollow?

Also, the one thing the artist got wrong is the location of New Londo and Dark Root. They were supposed to be much, much closer.

Beautiful. Yggdrasil in rock form.

But now way New Londo is lower than Lost Izalith. LI is supposed to be Hell, for fucks sake.

 

[Lyric Suite]

They did a great job making it feel like hell too lel

 

[bec de corbin]

it's certainly the low point of the game

 

[Caim]

Remember what I said about the Cinders mod updating regularly last Saturday? Well, yesterday it updated again.

 

[Puukko]

I am near the end of the game in Cinders, the ringed city and final boss remaining. I want to say that with no difficulty modifiers, this is on the easier side of Souls experiences, but there's plenty of tools to make it way harder. I have been using the covenant that makes enemies 30% stronger for a good chunk of the game, and then often forgotten to turn it off for bosses. There's some busted stuff in there like the great swamp ring that summons a lot of fire pillars that easily stagger and uplift enemies, and the 60 faith lightning spears that knock a lot of enemies off their feet on top of dealing mad damage at close range. I'm running a rather unorthodox build that has mediocre HP and shit for stamina but decent tankiness and really good damage output. This has allowed me to face tank bosses and pop a rogue water and stamina regen items to focus on ending fights pretty quickly. The hardest boss so far has been Nameless King by a mile, taking 18 attempts while the vast majority required 1-3. I wonder if Gael or Midir will change that, or if these angels will have the highest kill count by the time I'm done with this DLC...

The painted world DLC was pretty lame and padded with enemies, but the bosses were very cool to make up for it. The first boss (apparently normally a Sif throwback) has been completely changed to feature major characters from DS1 instead. Had me yelling "HIM?!" by the end of it.

 

[Caim]

I am near the end of the game in Cinders, the ringed city and final boss remaining. I want to say that with no difficulty modifiers, this is on the easier side of Souls experiences, but there's plenty of tools to make it way harder. I have been using the covenant that makes enemies 30% stronger for a good chunk of the game, and then often forgotten to turn it off for bosses. There's some busted stuff in there like the great swamp ring that summons a lot of fire pillars that easily stagger and uplift enemies, and the 60 faith lightning spears that knock a lot of enemies off their feet on top of dealing mad damage at close range. I'm running a rather unorthodox build that has mediocre HP and shit for stamina but decent tankiness and really good damage output. This has allowed me to face tank bosses and pop a rogue water and stamina regen items to focus on ending fights pretty quickly. The hardest boss so far has been Nameless King by a mile, taking 18 attempts while the vast majority required 1-3. I wonder if Gael or Midir will change that, or if these angels will have the highest kill count by the time I'm done with this DLC...

The painted world DLC was pretty lame and padded with enemies, but the bosses were very cool to make up for it. The first boss (apparently normally a Sif throwback) has been completely changed to feature major characters from DS1 instead. Had me yelling "HIM?!" by the end of it.

I almost always play with the "more enemies" curse to make things a bit harder. And it is harder early in the game because of your limited resources and options. But once you make it to around the Road of Sacrifices the difficulty relaxes quite a bit, if only because the increased enemy count is really goood for your soul count.

 

[Puukko]

"you beat him too fast for the music to get going" - my Souls nut buddy watching me disrespect Gael with lightning spears after stumbling into the fight.

 

[Caim]

"you beat him too fast for the music to get going" - my Souls nut buddy watching me disrespect Gael with lightning spears after stumbling into the fight.

Once you hit the soft cap for your casting you can break the game in half with ease. I did it with a Sorcerer and once got my hands on Soul Stream there were few things I couldn't just straight up delete from the game in a single casting. Pick up the Blueblood sword and enchant it with Magic for easy FP restoration and you're golden.