The gaming industry could stand to ask itself this more often

We've been over the menus before and you still refuse to accept that's just your opinion of how they function so I'm not going to drag it through the mud anymore

but I really don't know what you mean by lacking polish. It's a beautiful game with a lot of detail. And the only place the graphics consistently falter is in Blighttown, for a rather specific reason, and we have no reason to believe DkS2 will contain a segment with the same graphical concerns or that the team won't be able to address it in some way.

>Responds to a fraction of the sentence he quoted
>Acts like he's proven his point

God you just infuriate me nonstop

 

I said better needed graphics, not hyper realism. Please, read my posts more carefully. I don't know what game you're referring to, Kingdom Hearts, Pokémon, all of which have had or are going to have better graphics. Not sure of your point.

The items were never labelled clearly in what they could do, what was affected by what traits. Even now I'm still guessing, your items, equipment, weapons, quest items, etc, are all pretty poor in Dark Souls 2, except no one I've found has been able to bring up the items list, which makes me wonder further. Most are not cryptic, they're just symbols that don't correlate quickly, I'd rather be playing the game than try and decipher which weapon or helmet is better. It's a sign of outdated design, which is strange since I've seen better From Software interface design.

You do the same as well. I do not see a point in bringing it up though.
Point is that I find the information given to be from a biased source, so I find anything given to be in question. If you want me to pick apart your evidence I'll need a source, but I don't get how tests and community feedback is inherently proof of a good game.

 

Every weapon lists its stat requirements to wield, when moving to equip it you'd see how much it boosted your attack power, and if it had a special skill or command such was noted in the flavor text. Armor similarly displays the equip requirements, lists its boosts to stats, ailment defenses, and elemental defenses, and lists in the flavor text if it has a special effect. Same for shields, bows and arrows, items, everything. I don't know what you're looking for that it's not providing, but it provides more than most action games and a lot more than any traditional RPG ever dared.

Most of this is represented by symbols, which represents a barrier to entry, yes; but you don't ask that a coding language be dumbed down to make for a better skim, do you? It's like that for the ultimate convenience of the player, who, once they have learned the lexicon of the game, can weigh the value of an item at a glance because all of the information is compact and consistently placed. It's the minute or so that it takes you to look up an explanation and commit the nature of the symbols to memory, versus the cumulative minutes lost reading overlong explanations of what everything does or having your mind blank on a wall of text.

Not to mention, if you really do just want to get back to the action, the frigging stat boosts are color-coded! The game will show you whether the item you're looking at is better or worse than the one you're holding, it will tell you if something you've equipped is too heavy for you (and it even notes if it can be two-handed without penalty), and you can literally turn around and smack the nearest mook if you're really still stuck for the exact effectiveness of your Skullsmasher 9,000 versus that randomly dropped Rusty Knife you nicked off the last baddie. There is nothing stopping a newbie from picking up new digs, trying them on, seeing they don't work that great, and swapping back to their old rags if they're really in that much of a bloody murderous hurry. And it's faster than most other games, at that.

tl;dr please shut up about the smegging menus

 

Because I seem to have been misappropriated.

Graphically, Darkses did not need any refinement or improvement, it was sufficient. Graphics should always be subordinate to every other possible aspect in a game like this. As long as it's clear what is happening at a given moment in gameplay, it's perfect. But there are a lot of other problems that I was talking about. The bridge hellkite resets when you move from one chunk to another so when you run under it, which is really easy, it disappears. Then when you come back, it won't fly back out unless you follow the same path you had to the first time because of where it notices you. So, you can effectively defeat one of the toughest early game enemies by running past it. Activating the elevator in the Undead Burg does the same thing to any enemy. You just don't usually look at it. If an enemy is following you get to see him go *poof*. There are also safe zones against all enemies where one chunk meets the next because you can cross the area bounds but enemies can't. All of these things destroy any possible open world feel you might have because the programming makes it obvious that you're moving from one enclosure to the next and creates a feeling of separation. It's also exploitable. But there are other things that bug me about the execution, too. The magnitude vector of the plane of your character's feet will always be normal to the ground, even when it looks like you're sporting two vaporized ankles. Dead enemies have a startling tendency to fall through the floor, especially that first rat. So that's a lot of lost item drops. You can see ghosts poking out through walls in New Londo and walk basically right up to them without causing aggro. The AI will sometimes run into a few... issues. The Capra Demon's pathfinding is so bad that it will blindly swing into a wall because it can't tell that you're ten feet off the ground. I can't tell if it's a flaw or intentional, but in Sen's Funhouse the rock delivery unit will automatically go to preset directions as you progress through the level even after you've manually moved it. Also, the run animation looks lame.

Yeah... it's not game breakingly bad issues, but you gotta admit, a lot of these things should have been dealt with or at least hidden better, like in its predecessor.


Also, the menus are fine. There are no immediately noticeable flaws.

 

Most of those are 100% legit so I'm just gonna skip the ones I have nothing to say about

Granted, but it's hard to say that wasn't intentional. All the Hellkite guards is a bonfire and the Sunbro covenant, and the req for that was eventually lowered such that it can be achieved easily in the early game, so it appears to me that the dragon is meant to leave if you run past it, as if you've outsmarted it and it's no longer interested in you. (Not much of an outsmarting but that's where the heart seems to be.) And the fact that it doesn't return until you reach the far end of the bridge is kind of a blessing, since backtracking otherwise would be a pain in the ass.

That said, there was a pretty heinous glitch involving the Hellkite which caused it to jump to its death if you attacked it from a certain vantage point later on. If you were to shoot it from the tower where the Black Knight stands, it would jump to the bridge as per usual... and enter a heightened dead zone on ground level, keeling over and paying you the souls. So valid point either way.

Pretty sure that was intentional, just to screw with the player's head.

Oh come on ; n; That's not even a glitch

I dunno, I think people give DeS a little too much credit in that regard. It had its wonky pathfinding bugs and glitchy enemies too.

And let me preface this next bit by saying I'm not trying to excuse any of the flaws presented. But... I kinda find the bugs charming. After playing so many games like them with similar exploits, it almost adds to the immersion for me, in a contrary sort of way. They're the kind of flaws that don't stick out so badly as to ruin the experience. Ultimately they give one perspective on what the developers did spend time perfecting, and I find it hard to complain about bugs that benefit me or make me laugh.

I expect them to be fixed going forward into the series, because I trust the studio as much as I trust any one director. FromSoft has been serving up quality games throughout my childhood. What has been shown of DkS2 is enough to indicate they've an ear turned to player feedback, but it's not enough to assume that they will fail to address these cutting-room-floor issues again, and the notion strikes me as cruelly cynical. That's the kind of thing we just won't know 'til the game drops, and either way it probably won't stop the game being great if it continues to be the only issue.

for clarity that last bit's not aimed at you Jikki

 

Everyone with taste knows that Dragon's Dogma was the best budget RPG this generation.

 

The thing about the hellkite is, it's caused by the same thing that makes folk disappear when you activate elevators and the same thing that causes you to be outside of an enemy's "reach". If it flew away on its own, I'd understand your point, but it just poofs instead so it's obviously a flaw. I feel like it was just something they either noticed, then decided, "Whatever" or didn't notice and that seems slovenly. I also heard from my roommate that one day he just randomly picked up souls while he was headed to Darkroot and found the drop lying on the bridge. To this day, there's been no explanation. So there's that.

I've heard that in the past, but honestly, I can't really say for sure given how consistent it is and how there is no visible reason why it would do that. I feel like the Souls games usually show you a cue. In Demonses you can always see every ambush if you are patient and careful and smart. In both games, they usually create things that make sense, physically, but in this case there is no physical mechanism which would make the change so it feels just like the hellkite poofing instead of flying away. Still, it's really only for them to know and us to not.

I was talking about things I thought were flawed in general and that ranks really high, given I run a lot. I also forgot to mention that they took out the best helmet in the game.

I've played more Demonses and I've seen fewer problems with pathfinding and no enemies glitch to death. There are a couple of boss exploits like with Maneater and Storm King, but they've got more of a discovery feeling to them and in the case of Maneater, it doesn't reward you.

I don't like it when I can see the programming. It's like when you find typos in novels or continuity errors in television. So, you can see it your way and I'm going to understand you and let you count it in your plus column without argument, but I'm going to keep being annoyed by these things.

 

I've never seen it poof, it always flies away for me. And I've had it since day one. o_o Not sure what that's about.

I would be inclined to concede your point, but what physical mechanism exists before you operate it manually? It just kinda does its own thing no matter what in this case. And if you need a cue, well... Rumble rumble rumble rumble. :v

Fair enough. I think DkS was the more ambitious project as far as level design, which has probably screwed with the way they program enemies as well, so no doubt it has kinks to work out. But at least on the point of exploiting AI, DeS and DkS have common ground.

 

I think it suffered from that ambition. I really didn't like the lack of a true hub. Like, I basically hated Darkses for the first 10 or so hours because it lacked The Nexus. I still think it was a blunder, but for much different reasons and in a much different way. That's a totally different story, though. The main thing about the lack of a hub world is that they had to connect a bunch of places that shouldn't reasonably be next to each other and try to make it compact enough to fit together and fluid enough to create some continuity. I feel like that was too tall an order. I don't think a forest, a swamp, a volcano, a city, a valley and an inland sea fit together all that well and I feel like you really can see it. Each of these places strives to have it's own unique feel, but is in the end held back by the fact that it shouldn't because it's in the same place as all the rest of the other stuff and there should be a continuity. It's really hard for me to explain that feeling of total incongruity I get whenever I move from one area to the next. Anyhow, it was a good idea, but they should have made the map more sprawling and open when traveling between areas like in Shadow of the Colossus rather than into a series of branches as if they stapled a bunch of Demonses worlds together in a far less than optimal fashion.

AI exploits will always happen for these types of games, I just want them to be less cheese than they have been for both of these games.