From Software Dark Souls 3

[v1rus]

I found an error/hole in the plot.

the whole game is one big plot hole.

I concur.

Someone should let me know if they find some plot in that hole.

 

[Black Angel]

This only proves the Souls series, as great as it is, has its share of holes, half baked bits and left-over parts that don't make sense together.

Wouldn't have to end in this conclusion if it just ends at Dark Souls 1

 

[Gerrard]

into future (dark firelink shrine,

Uh, akshually Untended Graves and dark Firelink are in the past. If you go through the game without ever talking to the Handmaid in normal Firelink shrine, talk to her in the Dark one, then go back to the normal one, she will recognize you with an extra dialogue. So unless she somehow exists outside of time that is a pretty clear indicator.

 

[Perkel]

into future (dark firelink shrine,

Uh, akshually Untended Graves and dark Firelink are in the past. If you go through the game without ever talking to the Handmaid in normal Firelink shrine, talk to her in the Dark one, then go back to the normal one, she will recognize you with an extra dialogue. So unless she somehow exists outside of time that is a pretty clear indicator.

You are right. I remember it now.

 

[copebot]

I beat DS3 yesterday for the first time including all DLCs. I replayed DS1 when the remaster came out a couple years ago or so along with DS2, tried DS3 at that time, and then put it aside until recently. I started off with a relatively negative impression of the game. The animation style and combat was just so different from DS1 and DS2 that it put me off of it. However, by the time I got further into DS3, I started to get a better grip of the animation timing and how everything worked. The boss that I struggled the most with was Pontiff, if only because he has a number of attack chains that you can't really roll through. I didn't really understand how a lot of the bosses have 'punish' chains that make it so you don't want to get too close to them. Almost every boss in DS1 and DS2 can just be rolled through while you trade hits with them, so that part of how things worked just didn't make sense for me. There's just more of an emphasis around baiting specific attack animations with punish opportunities than in the other games. In the others, there are so few attack animations that everything is easy to memorize.

When you get more used to all the animations, the game isn't actually that different from how DS1 and DS2 work. It's just that all the enemies have mega uber hyper stamina and longer attack chains. So whereas in DS1 or DS2, you wait until they do their 2-hit chain, the average enemy in DS3 will do their spastic 9-hit combo chain into the air at which point you will plink them, and then wait for them to do another 6 hit aerial chain with a spell that they cast at the end. The developers also just spent incredible amounts of time creating a massive volume of animations for every enemy in the game and every boss in the game. Unlike DS2/DS1 where almost every boss attack has a limited queue of animations, a lot of bosses in DS3 can have these dynamic combos that are harder to predict, so you have to react to each specific tell in the appropriate way. There are more bosses with multiple phases than in any other Souls title and there are single bosses with more attack animations than half the bosses in DS1 put together. Lots of these animations provoke thoughts like "oh man, there's no way this 14 hit combo will be a 15 hit combo," but then GOTCHA, it turns out there's a 15th hit and it's a grab that clips with your desperate last-second roll even though you were 3 yards away and you're dead now.

The highlight for me of the entire experience was Slave Knight Gael. Unlike some of the other bosses who were a little like him in terms of dynamic combos, every single attack that he does makes sense in terms of Dark Souls logic and can be dodged just by reacting to it. He gradually transitions throughout combat introducing new types of attacks and becoming more aggressive as his HP bar goes down. The attack patterns are tricky without being totally illogical or impossible to track with the camera.

Like I said earlier, it took completing most of the game to really 'get' how everything worked. It was also significantly harder than either DS2 or DS1. There were multiple bosses that required at least 30 minutes of attempts for me (Pontiff, Gael, Midir, even Deacons took me like 6 attempts and a weapon swap). Some bosses that had a reputation of being hard seemed pretty straightforward to me like Dancer. By contrast, in DS2, I one or two shot every boss except for some DLC bosses like Fume Knight. I routinely had difficulties with various trash mobs, Pontiff's beasts, and even some of the NPC invasions. DS3 is just a harder game because there are so many more possible animations that can play, there are no consistent rules for anything, and you have to memorize more potential movesets to dodge stuff consistently. I played Sekiro before this and think that it's a much better game in every respect. It seems like with DS3 they wanted to create enemies that fight like they do in Sekiro, but they didn't want to fundamentally change the combat system. There are lots of enemies like the duelist raven dudes and the claw raven dudes that would be fine in Sekiro but are kind of ridiculous for DS3. Lots of bosses would be more fun as Sekiro bosses.

With Sekiro's design, just about everything has rules and every enemy in the game behaves consistently within those rules. With DS3, there are lots of enemies that just do things like "I stagger when you hit me three times in a row, but when I start this specific animation, I cannot be staggered" that you cannot know about without memorizing how the animations work. There are attacks that cannot be blocked and that will catch you in roll because it lasts longer than the iframes. You have to metagame the AI a little to know that they will do X animation if they are Y distance away from you, but you can only consistently roll out of it if you are at the edge of their weapon or whatever. With Sekiro, it's the same kind of animation style, but you always have a consistent way to counter each type of attack and it works the same way every time. There are some bosses like Nameless King that you have to position in such a way that the camera will not break and the boss will not hit you with whacky animations that clip through his mount, which means that you have to match the choreography of the fight and have the camera angle the developer intended you to have to make it work right. Midir is like that too, but it was much less frustrating and took me less time to figure out having already had those headaches with Nameless King.

Overall, I think I liked the first two games better, but this one did grow on me over time. It was certainly more frustrating than DS2 for me. With DS2, even on some of the parts where I struggled like all the grinding attempts on Lud and Zallen, I generally felt like I had a smooth mastery of the game's systems and that it was very similar to how DS1 worked. I could run into a boss, play carefully to watch what it did, and then breeze through the fight iframing through all the attacks. With DS3, I didn't feel like everything clicked until I got close to the DLC. I just felt like I was spamming attacks at the wrong time and getting caught in rolls until I had gone through a good chunk of the game already and become accustomed to what to expect from new enemies. That might have been what they were looking to accomplish by adding so much animation variation: making the game challenging for people who had played the other games. I don't think the game was nearly as atmospheric in terms of environment as either of the two other games, but I'm not entirely sure why. It could be just that DS1 and DS2 are quite unique from one another in terms of area design, whereas everything in DS3 is some kind of reference to DS1.

 

[Multidirectional]

Yeah, Dark Souls III combat is also the hardest to me out of all From Soft games and not in a fun way. Spammy enemies just irritate me and I doubt I could ever "gid gud" at it the way I did in DS/DSII/Sekiro. It may have the best combat "feels" in the series but Sekiro shits all over it in that regard too, as well as having a much more fair combat system that lets me feel fully in control of the action.

 

[copebot]

Yeah, Dark Souls III combat is also the hardest to me out of all From Soft games and not in a fun way. Spammy enemies just irritate me and I doubt I could ever "gid gud" at it the way I did in DS/DSII/Sekiro. It may have the best combat "feels" in the series but Sekiro shits all over it in that regard too, as well as having a much more fair combat system that lets me feel fully in control of the action.

My explanation for this is that in Sekiro, perfectly timing your counters to an enemy -- even a boss - is rewarded with a massive reversal that either instantly kills them or does massive damage. In DS3, most enemy combos are things that are best to just out-range until their recovery animation. You could perfectly roll through them or block them, but it's not better than staying slightly out of range in most instances. This makes it so the combat tends to involve lots of waiting for animations to finish even though it is supposed to be more fast paced.

Even parries in DS, which mimic the poise breaks of Sekiro, aren't quite as satisfying because they are basically memorization tests. You do this foofy left-hand move at a certain time in an animation that doesn't really have much to do with what the animations are doing and then get to do a highly damaging retaliatory animation. In Sekiro it's all based on when the other dude's weapon makes contact with yours and the way that everything looks is more fluid and intuitive.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I guess if you are a "roller", then DS3 is ok, it's rolling made perfect. But many of us played earlier games with other play-styles (parrying, tanking, etc), and for those, DS3 kinda sucked.

 

[Multidirectional]

I am fine with playing a roller in DSII, because of slow paced combat. I doubt I could get good enough to roll reliably well in DS III. Not that great at positioning game too, since so many enemies have these leaping attacks that let them close distances very fast. I'm still forcing myself to warm up to this game now, simply because it's the only available From Soft game that I haven't played to death yet.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Yeah, DS3 was pretty brutal for some of the bosses. I guess copebot had a lot of patience, to stand there and count off the number of attacks per each pattern, I am way too lazy for that, so I just went in like a retard and rolled my way through them, but it takes many tries. But reflexes play a large role, mine aren't very good anymore, so it made things harder. I think a person with good reflexes can roll around bosses pretty effectively.

 

[Multidirectional]

I am doing a Pyro run now so I cheesed most earlier bosses with Boulder Heave and later ones I killed mostly with Chaos Bed Vestige, and lots of rollspamming of course. Bosses are actually mostly significantly easier on this run compared to previous sword and shield char. Though Champion Gundyr ended up being way harder this time, about 10 deaths whereas I killed him on first try during shield run.

 

[Elwro]

Thanks for the write-up copebot !

I agree with all your points; I'd add that one head-scratcher for me was how poise worked in DS3. There is the whole mechanics of 'hyperarmor' which is simply hidden and makes no sense animation- and armor-wise.

 

[Curratum]

Hyper armor is linked to your weapon, not your armor though, isn't it?

I swing a big claymore while two-handing it -> once I pass Frame X of my attack, you can't interrupt me and we're trading at worst, and if I have the bigger sword, you will be left hurting more after the trade.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Apparently they messed up parrying too.
There was a video that analyzed how it worked and it seems that the parry only works if the parry hitbox window comes into contact with the attacker's hand, not the weapon.
I'm pretty sure that's not how that worked in Dark Souls II.

 

[Elwro]

But that's the thing: they broke stuff that worked in DS2; they made defender's armor irrelevant for being staggered; they made some innocent-looking attacks uninterruptable for no reason

 

[Curratum]

Who even cares about that, honestly? PVP is such a lagfest shitshow in DS3, it's not worth examining or learning the mechanics at all.

 

[copebot]

Thanks for the write-up copebot !

I agree with all your points; I'd add that one head-scratcher for me was how poise worked in DS3. There is the whole mechanics of 'hyperarmor' which is simply hidden and makes no sense animation- and armor-wise.

This is one of those things in which there isn't really a system that works consistently. It's just tied to specific animations and weapons and specific frame times. If this wasn't a From Software game with "Souls" in the title more people would have been moaning about this type of issue in the game, same with all the ways in which the NPCs do not even pretend like they're running on the same rules as you are. It makes me wonder if they originally intended to add a system that allowed you to animation cancel / feint for a stamina cost. The stuff that is good about DS3 aren't really related to the RPG aspect and are more related to how it works as an action game.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Who even cares about that, honestly? PVP is such a lagfest shitshow in DS3, it's not worth examining or learning the mechanics at all.

It's not just PvP though. The fact armor does nothing limits PvE playstyles as well.

People will argue that poise broke the previous games. But then magic did too. Maybe instead of getting rid of build options why not fix that stuff?

But then, we all know why armor works the way it does in DS3. Because that's how it worked in BB and why bother change the code lmao.

 

[Elwro]

Really? Having played hundresd of hour of BB with multiple playthroughs, I'm confident that armor is useful for resistances and FaShIoN only... I don't think BB has these invisible 'hyper armor thresholds' DS3 has?...

 

[vota DC]

Who even cares about that, honestly? PVP is such a lagfest shitshow in DS3, it's not worth examining or learning the mechanics at all.

It's not just PvP though. The fact armor does nothing limits PvE playstyles as well.

People will argue that poise broke the previous games. But then magic did too. Maybe instead of getting rid of build options why not fix that stuff?

But then, we all know why armor works the way it does in DS3. Because that's how it worked in BB and why bother change the code lmao.

I heard that Bloodborne Is the reason why characters that walk are fast as dashing characters in 1 and 2 and characters dashing are Usain Bolt.
Also enemies or are sleeping or are super aware that means no backstab or too easy backstab, no blocking knight because poise doesn't work and limited archery because super speed.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Really? Having played hundresd of hour of BB with multiple playthroughs, I'm confident that armor is useful for resistances and FaShIoN only... I don't think BB has these invisible 'hyper armor thresholds' DS3 has?...

It does:

https://www.bloodborne-wiki.com/2015/10/super-armor.html

And then of course there's this shit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls3/comments/4f8yy8/how_defense_and_absorption_really_work/

So basically, you put on Havel's tank armor, and you have no poise unless you are swinging an hyperarmor weapon, and you get no added defence, just some extra absorbtion which may or may not be worth anything.

Maybe this system works well in BB but in Dark Souls it makes no sense. Even conceptually speaking if i'm walking with thick granite slabs attached to my body i feel i shouldn't be able to get pushed around as if i was wearing some light cloth armor.

People bitched about Giant Dad in DS1 but hyperarmor feels exactly like that in PvP:

https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls3/comments/4n9toh/how_am_i_supposed_to_counter_hyper_armor_frames/

DS3 is the game where you can have naked Giant Dads.

 

[Curratum]

Literally 100% of my PVP in DS3 was swinging a greatsword and watching people cry.

Thankfully, the game's hilariously bad multiplayer experience in general cut the time I spent in pvp VERY short.

 

[Elwro]

So basically, you put on Havel's tank armor, and you have no poise unless you are swinging an hyperarmor weapon, and you get no added defence, just some extra absorbtion which may or may not be worth anything.

Maybe this system works well in BB but in Dark Souls it makes no sense.

Your point about Havel's armor is what I meant. This is just jarring in DS3. BB, however, has nothing like Havel's armor, so the point is moot: even if that system is somewhere there in the background, there's no way to notice it, since the only meaningful differences between armor sets is in the resistances (they are all light).

 

[Lyric Suite]

Right. It makes sense in BB but not DS3.

DS3 is basically laziness defined. They used the BB engine because it was more graphically advanced than the one they had for Dark Souls but didn't feel the need to change how anything worked in the code as far as armor or other stuff is concerned.

Between handing DS2 to a different team and recycling BB for DS3 it feels like From really had no interest in doing any Dark Souls game after the first one and might have just been compelled by their publisher.

 

[Elwro]

Also, the area after Vordt feels like a rehash of Hemwich Charnel Lane and Forbidden Woods village assets.