From Software The Dark Souls II Megathread™

[Max Damage]

Yeah, I'm sure one will get much reaction from Timmy98 who will just google a fix and play offline ever after. All this achieves is shrinking online pool for everybody, yourself included, such epic win.

 

[ferratilis]

Almost everyone I run into these days is a dexterity ballerina. Although, last night I ran into a guy using what looked like Bloodhound's Step from Elden Ring. I didn't even know such an ability exists in DS2. Since he was a mage, I guess it's some spell. He backstabbed me before I knew what's going on.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I don't understand this kind of "trolling", imagine being such a sad loser that you get joy from bricking someone's character.

I had a dickhead do something like this to me in DS3. I was lucky in that it didn't insert a ton of items, but it was trying to give you things that clearly shouldn't exist so you'd get picked up by a From automated ban, as far as I can tell.

Fortunately, dumping the items was enough to sort it out, but the one thing that he did that could've screwed me if I hadn't passed that point in the game already was that he increased my Dark Souls held which I don't think there's anything you can do about without actually editing your character. I also don't think that worked the way he wanted it to... not sure if the item has an internal limit far lower than what he tried to pass me or if it just has a display maximum. That could've borked the character or run for me otherwise. Was pretty annoyed in any case.

 

[Bendu]

I once got a soft ban in DSII vanilla because of a dickhead oneshotting the Ancient Dragon and messing up my savefile. Since than I manually backup my savefiles once in a while and use mods like Blue Acolyte (DS2) or Blue Sentinel (DS3). Never got a soft ban for using my backups or using those mods.

 

[ferratilis]

Thanks for the info. I installed Blue Acolyte, but I don't think it's working. Look at this little bitch, as soon as he spawned he teleported on top of that pillar and started shooting arrows at me. After realizing the arrows can't get me, he came down and one shotted me with a spell, even though my shield was raised and has good magic protection. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this isn't something you can just do in the game, especially getting on top of that pillar?

 

[Bendu]

Aren't you the invader in this case? He may have used parry walk to get there, but oneshotting you sounds like he was cheating.

 

[RoSoDude]

I watched the entire video at 0.5x speed because I love you (in just the same way Christ loves all of God's children), and I have to tell you that while there is some bullshit on display (Freja's laser, Stone Dragon's stomp, Mimic's bite are all notorious), so so many of these are just bad animations due to roll hyperarmor. Hence all the shots of the player seeming to get hit right after rolling by an attack hitting the air behind them. You've never seen the player get staggered directly out of a roll in Dark Souls 2, because FromSoft made the strange decision to make that impossible.

Every single Sir Alonne grab clip (in fact, most of the grab clips in the video, I won't defend the Mimic hitbox but most of the rest are fair) sees the player panic rolling at least a half second early, getting hit during the latter portion of the roll, a late stagger animation playing, followed by the "teleport" into the grab. Grabbed while they were way over there!!! So unfair!!!!!1 No, not really. If you wanted to argue that grabs should only count for hits to center mass and "glancing" hits should just do some damage, I would largely agree, but a bad grab rule + bad grab animation =/= bad hitbox. Moreover, it's still your fault if you panic roll towards a guy's sword when he's charging up for a stab.



You can find plenty of equally egregious examples in Dark Souls 3 (including grab teleports), take this "bad hitbox" compilation starting at 37:00. It's just a reality with all of these games. Dark Souls 2's issues are exaggerated due to the Agility system and some really poor choices about how to handle the visuals, but it's not drastically different.

It's so satisfying to be right. I found this youtuber who is doing obsessive critical breakdowns of Dark Souls 2 misinformation, including a 7-part series of (short!) videos debunking Mauler's 10-hour diatribes. One of the best is this examination of DS2 hitboxes using the Debug Manager to actually see the real hitboxes, demonstrating that 90% of Mauler's clips showed a fair hit on an early roll, with no "delayed", "lingering", or "misaligned" hitboxes, and only a few with inflated size that are no worse than what you find in the other Souls games. In particular, the most cited grab attacks are substantially more fair in DS2, as the Pursuer, Sir Alonne, and Ivory King grabs actually have tighter hitboxes than the Gaping Dragon, Iron Golem, Curse-Rotted Greatwood, or Dancer grabs, and all of the games (even up to Elden Ring) have bad teleporting into the animation. It's just exacerbated in DS2 due to roll hyperarmor frames, but in terms of gameplay it's no less fair.

Yes, the Mimic wake up attack is bullshit, yes the giants have a broken hitbox, these are probably the only truly unfair ones.



He also shows how Mauler will deliberately aggro a whole horde of enemies across an entire level, sometimes by going through an area backwards, just to make the "ganks" look worse artificially. If you play methodically with attention to your environment, DS2's group fights are the most fair and tactically interesting in the series.



On the point of "ganks", he also has some videos exposing the Scholar of the First Sin whiners as deliberately lying about the "enemy spam" which is about on par in both versions. Scholar is just different, and while I do have some problems with a few of the redesigns, some people act like they just copypasted a bunch of new enemies in and called it a day, rather than reworking the encounters from scratch with new AI triggers to deliver more deliberate and tactical fights in many places.

 

[Max Damage]

Don't have the time to listen to needlessly long essay by random guys, as someone who played vanilla and SotFS close enough to each other, SotFS has bad romhack vibe of randomly shuffling enemies around and adding pointless changes, mostly for the worse. They had to justify releasing "upgraded" version so soon and decided to add lots of pointless shit, nothing more to it.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

It seems largely unfair to call the DS2 hitbox criticism dishonest even if it's wrong.

There's definitely issues. People might conflate misaligned hitboxes for terrible animations and bad player communication, but it's a pretty good guess given the lack of debug tools available at the time.

The reality is the truth here really only matters in a technical sense. It doesn't matter if the hitboxes are misaligned or not. If, through bad animations, the player continually finds themselves getting hit while rolling in ways that look like they should succeed, with a complete lack of information to show otherwise, they are going to blame the hit registration for being broken, and they will be completely justified in this complaint.

Autistically yelling "haha! Ackchually the hitboxes are fine!!" is essentially just scoring meaningless points for your side in a feeble attempt to undermine criticism. The central issue remains - the hit detection, animations, and general gameplay around rolling is so extremely scuffed that it gives the impression that the hitboxes are broken, which is awful for game feel and, more importantly, makes it harder to accurately predict roll timings in an unfair way. The hit feedback still sucks even if the hitboxes are fine. Yes, all DS games have this issue to a degree, but ADP combined with the frankly awful animation makes it significantly worse in DS2. Having unreliable hit feedback when rolling in an action game like this is frankly unacceptable, regardless of hitboxes.

DS2 defenders are so high on copium at this point. These response videos are being used to defend the hitboxes, but really only show how utterly broken the rest of the game is.

 

[Max Damage]

Mimics, ice rats, and Frigid Outskirts horses have the worst hitboxes in whole trilogy, only retards would argue otherwise. Guess what was left untouched in SotFS? I like DS2 for what it is, but it's baffling how much fanboys dickride From even when they obviously half-ass shit and fuck up what perfectly worked before (great job splitting stamina/equip load and nerfing physical armor into nothing in same entry, now let's fuck with most of shields while we're at it).

 

[Child of Malkav]

So it doesn't matter that the hitboxes are fine and functioning as they should (despite what's been regurgitated over the years by bandwagoners) but if the visual feedback has not been fixed game is unplayable. Despite all that was added or innovated upon, muh visuals is all that matters.
Nothing but haters. Feel free to fuck off. Your retardation has been on display for long enough. Go cry some more . DkS2 is the richest on mechanics. And focuses more on dungeon crawling instead of flashy spectacle bosses. Go play Roll Slop 3 and Elden Shit if you want that crap.

 

[Strange Fellow]

What does it mean that the hitboxes are "functioning as they should"? That you take damage if the hitbox of the attack collides with your character's hitbox? That has never been in contention. The problem is that the hitboxes in these games aren't precisely molded around the things they represent, so you need invincibility frames to mask that imprecision. If they wanted to eliminate that system they should have made the hitboxes better or introduced glancing blows. You can't just remove the lubricant of i-frames and then give up.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

So it doesn't matter that the hitboxes are fine and functioning as they should (despite what's been regurgitated over the years by bandwagoners) but if the visual feedback has not been fixed game is unplayable.

Literally yes.

The gameplay of Dark Souls relies heavily on quick, reliable player inputs, reacting to moves, and timing. Even Dark Souls 2's mechanical changes still emphasize these elements, especially with how many roll-timing related traps it has. All of these are made significantly worse by the terrible animations and unreliable presentation of the mechanics, to the point where basic mechanics like dodging are difficult to predict reliably because of the ambiguity of the animations.

If you think that's remotely equivalent to "muh visuals" then you're an idiot.

By all means, enjoy the game for it's extended mechanics. That's fine. It's just a shame it's not particularly well made, and many people dislike it for that reason.

 

[Child of Malkav]

The gameplay of Dark Souls relies heavily on quick, reliable player inputs, reacting to moves, and timing.

The gameplay of Roll Slop 3 and Elden Shit relies on twitch reflexes. The good ones don't need this trash spectacle to be good games.

All of these are made significantly worse by the terrible animations and unreliable presentation of the mechanics, to the point where basic mechanics like dodging are difficult to predict reliably because of the ambiguity of the animations.

How are the animations bad? How are the mechanics presented? WTF are you talking about? Bugged feedback > everything else? I don't even...

If you think that's remotely equivalent to "muh visuals" then you're an idiot.

You're only talking about presentation and animations. You're right, I am an idiot for giving this much attention and time of day.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

You're only talking about presentation and animations. You're right, I am an idiot for giving this much attention and time of day.

You seem to have an extremely reductive and autistic understanding of gameplay and visuals. You seem to think they they exist purely independently and a criticism of one is not a criticism of the other by definition.

If you don't understand how presentation of mechanics is a major factor of gameplay, then no amount of trying to explain it is going to help you.

For example, if Sekiro didn't reliably display the Kanji for sweeping attacks, that's a gameplay issue, even if the complaint is purely about a visual element, because the element exists to complement the gameplay by giving the player a visual warning of an incoming attack. It needs to be a reliable indicator because it has gameplay implications. These things affect each other in tangible ways. Simply ignoring my perfectly valid criticism because "muh visuals" shows how little you understand game design. Please stop posting, you're making an absolute fool of yourself.

How are the animations bad? How are the mechanics presented? WTF are you talking about? Bugged feedback > everything else? I don't even...

The adaptability stat determines how many iframes you have. However, your roll animation remains the same. This already adds a level of unreliability that wasn't in the original, as low ADP builds will essentially have their characters "roll through" attacks only to get hit by them. Even worse, as RoSoDude pointed out, there's no feedback whatsoever when this happens, but will frequently be a stun animation after finishing the roll, making things even more confusing. Add in how attacks can teleport the player upon completion, and you get an extremely unreliable rolling system. Even at higher ADP with more iframes, the issue remains because the roll iframes are very rarely related to the roll animation and the stuns and teleports are still confusing. The game is expecting me to make accurate rolls to avoid damage while simultaneously making any feedback on said rolls inconsistent and unreliable, which is awful, unfair and frustrating.

This makes rolling extremely difficult to learn, makes the hitboxes seem extremely wonky, and generally is a huge detriment to the gameplay around rolling.

ADP would have worked much better if they either used custom roll animations for each level, or sped up/slowed down parts of the roll to match your iframes. This way, a very simple rule like "whenever I'm on my back, I'm invulnerable" would have gone a very, very long way to communicating to the player when their roll was too early or too late based on their ADP, allowing players to actually master the roll in a way that isn't trial and error bullshit.

As for "lol you think animation problems are the most important things in the whole game??" No. I simply said that the hitboxes criticism is still largely valid because the core issue stems from a different problem. The animations in DS2 suck, but they are hardly the biggest problem the game has. Listing all the problems with DS2 would be a very, very long post because the game is terribly designed in almost every way. We're just talking about the horrible animations right now.

 

[Multidirectional]

You seriously find rolling in DS II harder to learn than in DS III/ER? I don't see any issue with rolling in II at 100 AGL, always found it reliable. And I like that I don't have to use it as much as in later games.

 

[Child of Malkav]

For example, if Sekiro didn't reliably display the Kanji for sweeping attacks, that's a gameplay issue

You don't need that red symbol to know what to do. Because it's built into the enemy animation charge attack. Horizontal gleam on the blade = jump, vertical = mikiri or deflect.

The adaptability stat determines how many iframes you have. However, your roll animation remains the same. This already adds a level of unreliability that wasn't in the original, as low ADP builds will essentially have their characters "roll through" attacks only to get hit by them.

Yeah it would have been great if they had different animations at different thresholds. In an ideal world. Unfortunately that's not the case and the player can adapt and change their dodge timings, dodging later than usual. We did that for every game when learning new timings.
ADP as a stat, together with the covenant of champions and the extinction mechanic add a way to customize your own difficulty through the game. ER did the same but differently, by directly adding easy modes throughout to accommodate the 25 million tourists.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

You don't need that red symbol to know what to do. Because it's built into the enemy animation charge attack. Horizontal gleam on the blade = jump, vertical = mikiri or deflect.

So you're saying that my argument about gameplay and visuals being related is incorrect, and your counterexample is to show that visuals and gameplay are related?

Bravo. Very clever.

The red marker is still quite important DESPITE the gleaming. The effect warns you regardless of your facing towards the enemy, and generally makes it SIGNIFICANTLY easier to see when an attack is coming, which is extremely important in the heat of battle, especially against multiple enemies.

Play without the Kanji and tell me the difficulty is the same or the gameplay is unchanged.

You seriously find rolling in DS II harder to learn than in DS III/ER? I don't see any issue with rolling in II at 100 AGL, always found it reliable. And I like that I don't have to use it as much as in later games.

To paraphrase: "Who cares if you can point to the actual mechanics and explain exactly how they make everything more confusing in tangible ways. It feels fine TO ME so therefore you're wrong."

I'm not saying I find rolling harder to learn in DS2. I'm saying rolling is objectively harder to learn in DS2, and the reason largely comes down to bad design rather than anything related to depth or strategy. After the pretty good rolling of DS1 this is certainly a step backwards, and they could have improved the balance and given it more depth without sacrificing the usefulness of the rolling animation by making better choices when designing the game.

That's probably the most annoying aspect of DS2 overall, and probably what turns so many people off (and justifiably so). With some extra work it could have been fantastic with it's new mechanics fixing the problems from DS1. Instead, It just feels kind of rushed. Nothing quite fits together or works right and it's always at least a little bit janky. Mechanics from DS1 are made worse by new mechanics and no work was done to really integrate the new systems with the old ones seamlessly. Two separate and unrelated healing systems, reliable rolling compromised by ADP and animation problems, etc.

 

[Hell Swarm]

Why are you trying to argue which part of a from game is more broken? They're all fucked! Every system is buggy in some way. You look past it and hope it doesn't fuck you over.

 

[Max Damage]

Here's very simple fix to adaptability: tie roll distance to it, remove variable i-frames, unfuck armor and shields, tie i-frames to equip load like in other DS games. On my full SotFS playthrough I didn't level either ADP or VIT until late game because roll distance alone is enough to dodge everything, and wearing heavy armor reduces it on top of providing no actual defense.

 

[Child of Malkav]

The red marker is still quite important DESPITE the gleaming. The effect warns you regardless of your facing towards the enemy, and generally makes it SIGNIFICANTLY easier to see when an attack is coming, which is extremely important in the heat of battle, especially against multiple enemies.

Play without the Kanji and tell me the difficulty is the same or the gameplay is unchanged.

The symbol is not necessary at all.
On top of that there's also the unique sound cue it makes when charging. And since you look at the enemy you can see the gleam clearly on the weapon even when the weapon is obscured by dust and you also recognize the animation after a while. The symbol simply isn't needed. At all.
But it is for people like you who wike pwetty cwolors.

to bad design rather than anything related to depth or strategy

Oh yeah, shame on them for not thinking about..... everything, all at once.
Animation change depending on stat threshold happened in gothic 1 and 2. I don't know any other game that implemented that. Sure it would have been cool for DkS2 to have that, but if it didn't it doesn't mean the game is literally unplayable.
Even if the game was perfect you'd still find reasons to hate it.

 

[RoSoDude]

What does it mean that the hitboxes are "functioning as they should"? That you take damage if the hitbox of the attack collides with your character's hitbox? That has never been in contention. The problem is that the hitboxes in these games aren't precisely molded around the things they represent, so you need invincibility frames to mask that imprecision. If they wanted to eliminate that system they should have made the hitboxes better or introduced glancing blows. You can't just remove the lubricant of i-frames and then give up.

The hitboxes are just as precise (or imprecise) as the other games, with a few exceptions that are extra bullshit (mimic and giant come to mind). For 95% of hitboxes, the very design same principles apply across all games: the hitbox for a sword is an ellipsoid that surrounds the blade and tracks it 1:1 through the short active period of its animation, and for many enemies there may be an extra hitbox on the enemy's arm. Stomps and hand grabs use sphere colliders, as do shockwave attacks. DS1 and DS2 have just as many questionable hitbox designs as one another, with DS3 arguably being a bit more consistent but still full of problematic ones.

Despite what ignorant Dunning-Krugers may think, it is not ideal for a hitbox to be the exact size and shape of the weapon model you see in game. This is most visible on the player's end, as players complain when the longsword thrust in DS2 fails to hit enemies right at the tip of its range due to the hitbox having exactly the "correct" length and deactivating at the very end of the animation. DS3 player weapon hitboxes are hugely inflated to make it easier to hit things, which also unfortunately applies to the handful of enemy NPCs who use the same weapons rather than bespoke hitboxes.

For enemies, the designers want attacks that can threaten the player at various ranges and angles which require reaction timing and/or deliberate movement to avoid. Since the player character hurtbox is very small and precise to their skeletal model, attack hitboxes which are just as precise would result in less predictable gameplay where enemies are unable to offer a consistent threat (for the same reason that a "correct" longsword hitbox is frustrating when wielded against precise enemy hurtboxes). Attacks that you would expect to be hit by would harmlessly glide past your shoulder or between your legs, especially when hugging close to the opposite side of their body. Moreover, the present problem with DS2's roll hyperarmor (where you are staggered and moved into grabs only after the roll animation is complete) would be replicated across all combat, as swords would come into contact with various limbs later than expected, leading to less reliable theat timings. The model of "large hitboxes, small hurtboxes" used across all of From's games allows the player to dodge via gross movements or immunity frames, but not by unpredictable misalignment of meshes.

It's obvious when you think about an enemy like the Ruin Sentinels that they should be able to hit you with more than just the tip of their hammers, lest they be made completely trivial by circlestrafing. At the same time, it feels unfair when a Silver Knight hits you with the back end of his spear during a thrust, so spear enemies in later games will only count the part in front of their hands. Many bosses (including DS3) have additional hitboxes on their hands or arms to account for their additional size over the player, such that hugging close does not let the player stay automatically out of their swing range.

I agree about glancing blows, in my opinion a stab should only lead to a grab if it properly hits center of mass. Not even Elden Ring does this, though, so I don't know why DS2 gets singled out. Every Pursuer/Alonne/Ivory King "bullshit grab" clip I've seen is the player early panic rolling towards the sword arm anyway, so my sympathy for those is limited.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

> DS2 hitreg is garbage
> Actually, aside from a few admittedly unfair cases, DS2 hitreg is fine
> REEEEEEE!!!! You're high on copium! DS2 is shit

 

[Max Damage]

DS2 is fine, it's just lower quality than other games from the trilogy, no need to be a butthurt fanboy about it.

 

[RoSoDude]

Having i-frames tied directly to a stat rather than gear is actually an awesome idea for an action RPG, as in theory it would lead to further differentiation between evasive builds and tankier defensive builds on top of the granular rolling + stamina regeneration system DS2 implemented for equip load. In practice ADP ends up not really fulfilling that role, instead being a stat that every player is prompted to put a few points into regardless of their playstyle.

The worst thing about ADP is how they display the information in the menu. It would have been better if ADP were called AGL, and the derived agility stat were just called "evasion", directly related to your number of i-frames. The resistances and poise could be moved to VIT to make that a better defensive stat, as the agility effect on dodging and estus is already prominent enough. Attunement could still give minor increases to evasion to give magic builds the same flexibility they have now.

The other (related) problem with ADP is that the first agility breakpoint moves you from 5 i-frames to 8 i-frames, while later increases are more incremental and come more spaced out. I suspect they did this to make the effect very obvious for anyone who leveled ADP, as otherwise it would be easy to disregard dodging improvements as placebo. This lopsided effect would be unnecessary if evasion breakpoints were clearly displayed in the stat display menu. In my opinion, anything over 10 i-frames is overkill, so the actual range of ADP increases that lead to meaningful build differentiation is quite small. You'd be stupid to not invest a few points to get 60-100% more invincibility, so every build ends up good at dodging rather than it being a significant stat investment for people who want to play shieldless.