Dark Souls II – A Step Forward, Misunderstood

Original post: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/the-dark-souls-ii-megathread%E2%84%A2.78690/page-383

In 2019 I finally got around to playing Dark Souls 2 (Scholar of the First Sin) after playing Dark Souls at the end of 2017. I went into the game expecting to like it despite all of the negativity that surrounds it, based on the the recommendations of some people whose opinions I actually trust. Overall I was definitely not disappointed. I don’t know which game I liked better, because they both have strengths and weaknesses and my overall enjoyment was pretty close. I think most of the complaints about DS2 are factually spurious (which I’ll elaborate), but contain an underlying truth about the game — it often fails to communicate effectively to the player, which likely is why so many people seem to have gotten the wrong idea about it.

My favorite change in the design philosophy of DS2 is the new focus on resource management and long-term consequences for your performance. At first, DS1 feels like it has major consequences for death, with you losing humanity and all of your souls (pending retrieval) when you die. However, I quickly realized that death was only a minor setback, souls were easy enough to grind out again, and the humanity system was essentially pointless as it basically just made it possible to get ganked. DS2’s humanity system is a huge improvement, with every death chipping away at your maximum HP and encouraging you go human and keep it for as long as possible (for what it’s worth, I also think human effigies are thematically cooler than the humanity sprites, but that’s neither here nor there). Enemy despawning serves the dual purpose of alleviating tedium if an area’s giving you too much trouble and also making souls a finite resource. This meant that every time I lost my souls, I’d actually give a damn about trying to get them back. In this context, lifegems are actually a good inclusion, as they enforce long-term decisionmaking about what you’re willing to expend to get through an area, and turn the game away from a series of a discrete challenges where only your short-term performance matters and towards a more cohesive end-to-end experience. I get the complaint about farmable healing, but lifegems are initially limited and not too cheap, and reasonably well-balanced in terms of their use animation and slow heal over time. Moreover, you have to be deluded to argue that DS1 was elegantly and perfect with estus, because you could completely destroy the healing balance through kindling, or just spam one of your 99 humanity to heal between fights. The difference is, DS2 actively encourages resource use and makes it feel like a genuine part of the game, along with the humanity system and multiplayer (I still got invaded more than a dozen times in 2019). Renewable resources were a great inclusion in DS1, but ultimately made the game feel limiting at times. I really appreciate DS2’s willingness to overhaul a lot of the systems to address this.

I started the game as a Swordsman and ended the game as a DEX+INT light armor rapier/curved sword/parrying dagger user with some spells, which is pretty much what I did in DS1 with some twists (I still have not blocked since my very first hours of DS1). My first impressions of the RPG systems were fairly positive. The classes in DS1 seem to promise a wide variety of playstyles, but most of them are flavors on the same basic combat approach. I chalk up the difference to how fully featured most of the classes are in DS1 — every class starts with an effective right hand weapon, a shield, and something to them apart (e.g. some form of magic or a combination of stats and equipment that orients them towards a particular strength). It’s clear in DS1 that blocking is intended to be a core mechanic for most players, and the starting class’ stats suggest a direction for character development more than they really limit the player. By contrast, every class in DS2 has more distinct benefits and drawbacks in both equipment and stats. The swordsman starts with 2 upgraded swords and high Dexterity, but low Strength, health, equip load, and no shield. The Warrior starts with well-rounded physical stats and a shield, but a broken sword. The Sorcerer is adept with spells, but only has a dagger to defend themselves up close and lacks the stats to wield anything better. The Deprived has an even stat distribution and starts at level 1 with no equipment to give maximum flexibility in character development. The point is, each of these leads to a very distinct way of playing the game from the start, with entirely different ways of engaging enemies, dealing damage, and surviving encounters.

The stats also feel much more relevant and balanced, with early choices making a large difference in combat potency and available options. The stat curves are mostly well thought-out, often offering a greater benefit to as you invest more and featuring improvements to multiple derived stats along the upgrade path. There are a few things I’d change, though. I like the inclusion of the Agility stat, but I think Adaptability should have just been Agility (partially so its effect on invincibility frames could be made explicit), with resistance tied to Vitality to make it a more effective tanking stat. It made a lot of sense to decouple equip load from Endurance, which was simply too valuable in Dark Souls 1, but it seems pretty underwhelming on its own (I ended the game with 5 VIT). I’m not fond of the diminishing returns on Vigor, which offers a whopping 30HP until 30, 20HP until 50, and 5HP after 50. This makes Vigor an absurdly good stat early on when you have lower HP, and less good as you upgrade it. Ideally, it’d start at 20HP per level and go up to 30HP after a certain point to keep up the cost of investment. Perhaps this was intentional, but it seems backwards to me. I’d also have liked if Attunement had a greater impact on the number of casts at lower levels while you’re working your way up to additional spell slots. All in all, though, I found myself making more interesting choices about what stats to level over the course of 190 levels than in DS1, which derived most of its choice from a steeper level curve, where I ended at around level 90.

It’s hard to talk too much about the RPG systems and stats without also discussing weapons. I stuck with the scimitar for most of the game, following my affinity for curved swords in DS1, but found myself dissatisfied with it over time. The moveset is a lot more sluggish, and DS2’s hitboxes make its short range pretty unforgiving. I must admit that DS2’s combat gameplay isn’t as snappy and responsive as DS1’s, which I’ve read has to do with the fact that every animation is motion captured rather than partially keyframed. I eventually extended my arsenal with Ricard’s Rapier, and finally upgraded to the Warped Sword and a magic-infused Ice Rapier for the DLC content. I definitely found the DEX options a bit underwhelming in DS2, largely due to their limited damage types (very few options for Strike) and the gimped nature of DEX scaling (S DEX scaling means that a minimum of 60% of your physical dexterity rating is added to damage, while S STR scaling guarantees at least 100% of your physical strength rating is added). Strength weapons have the benefit of higher base damage, better scaling, more versatile damage types, greater ability to stagger opponents, and frequently better attack coverage, with the downside of being slower and costing more stamina. While I found thrusting weapons to be quite potent, curved swords definitely felt undertuned for the aforementioned reasons, especially for how many enemies are strong against slashing damage in the game (of which I overall approve as striking weapons are frequently shafted in RPGs). When I got to the Ivory King DLC, I found myself barely able to lay a scratch the basic mobs even with my ~45 DEX/INT and S scaling weapons and sorceries, so I had to parry and riposte through the whole area.

Speaking of which, parrying offers a great segue for me to praise the actual combat mechanics. Though it feels a little jankier to play due to the hitboxes and animations, DS2’s mechanics are massive incline in the abstract. One of the biggest problems with DS1 was how easily combat could be utterly cheesed into oblivion. People often mention ranged cheese with arrows and sorceries, but melee combat in DS1 can be just as degenerate with backstabs and parries. Black Knights and one-off enemies like Havel lose all menace when you realize that the easiest way to fight them is to circlestrafe them faster than they can turn to face you and chain backstab them to death. Parrying entails some risk, but with active parry frames that come out as soon as you press the button, it’s fairly straightforward to cheese even groups of enemies with the excessive immunity period on riposte. DS2 makes great strides in crafting combat mechanics and enemy designs that limit or discourage this garbage and reward actual skill and tactics. I’ll just say it here folks: ENEMY TRACKING IN DARK SOULS 2 IS INCLINE. Enemies actually stay locked onto the player and require movement to acquire a backstab, which only succeeds if the enemy stays in place for the grab rather than helpfully assuming the position a T-pose for you to ram a sword up their spine. Many enemies actively punish backstab fishing and circlestrafe cheese, such as the armored turtles with their shell slam attack or the Heide Knights with their swift 360 slash. Backstabs are something you earn with deft movement, timing, or stealth, and enemies and bosses alike require you to actually dodge, block, and exercise a greater degree of movement than holding right on the analog stick to flank. Parrying has seen similar improvements, requiring more skill to execute but ultimately being more natural to learn. Each type of parrying implement has different startup frames, active frames, and recovery frames which must be learned to be effective. However, the parry window actually aligns with the part of the animation that you’d expect this time, so they’re pretty intuitive to learn even with the large variations in timings. I started out using a Buckler, which has a forgiving parry window but a long startup period, but later swapped to the parrying dagger for its faster startup to give me more flexibility in combat. It doesn’t end there, though. There are two possible ripostes, one being if you attack early enough to get them with a standing riposte while they’re falling down, and another if you wait long enough to let them fall to the ground. If you attack too early for either of these windows, you can lose your riposte altogether. This adds some actual nuance to parrying enemies in groups, since you have a skill-based opportunity to decide when to get your defense frames, which are also cut down considerably from DS1. As a plus, many bosses can be parried but not riposted, emphasizing parrying as a tool in your combat arsenal rather than a separate timing minigame that obviates all other mechanics.

As for encounter design itself, it’s largely a strict improvement on DS1, and all of the whining about group combat is rubbish. First of all, DS1 had plenty of group combat, and it often was far more egregious. DS1 loved to put you up against groups of enemies in cramped corridors that would cause half of your weapons to just bounce off the walls (think the Channeler rave party segment in Undead Parish, or the entirety of upper New Londo Ruins). Enemy attacks would layer like crazy and sometimes you’d be screwed from the getgo if you made one false move. This, along with the abusable aggro rules and general cheese, encouraged me to constantly pull enemies with arrows or spells to fight them one on one as is commonly argued is true of DS2. DS2 actually nails group combat with a lot of subtle improvements. One big one is the arenas — you usually have enough room to actually attack with your weapons, and the arenas will often have various terrain to provide cover from ranged attackers and slow down enemies joining the fight. Destructible terrain is also used rather extensively to provide strategic opportunities around pathing or to guide enemies to self-destruct with black powder barrels. The layering of attacks is much more manageable with more gaps in enemy movesets. It’s viable to rush in and dispatch enemies decisively, as well as to lead enemies to chase you for hit and run tactics. From early on I relied on rush tactics for even the most populous of encounters, like the glut of Royal Swordsmen before the Ruin Sentinels, because it was frankly both effective and fun. Constantly backing up to try to get “””fair””” one-on-one fights seemed futile with how often enemies aggro together and are capable of chasing you for long distances and trapping you in a corner (I’m thinking of the Lonely Weeaboo Knights in Iron Keep, for instance). It’s possible some players took the message that they’d get swarmed if they didn’t pull individual enemies and cheese the aggro ranges and they just never learned what I did about the available strategies. That is a fault of the game in communication rather than the actual balance of encounters, but I can’t think what else they could have done to get players on board other than being even more punishing towards this playstyle.

Boss design is a bit of a wash. Following on with the game’s focus on group encounters, the group bosses in the game are decidedly better executed than those in DS1, with the likes of the Ruin Sentinels, Double Dragonrider, and Throne Watcher and Defender emphasizing positional awareness and engagement tactics far better than the likes of Ornstein and Smough, whose interaction with each other and the terrain are simply too broken to offer as satisfying a fight (for the record, the Bell Gargoyles took me upwards of 20 tries because I neglected to upgrade my weapon and still sucked, while O&S took me only 3 tries). The Ruin Sentinels alone took me countless attempts due to my lackluster DEX slashing build, but each time I learned something new to apply to my next attempt. You get a good chance to learn the first Ruin Sentinel’s moveset on the platform, after which you must decide the manner in which you engage the other 2 — do you preempt the 2nd with a plunging attack before the 3rd catches up, or do you bait the 2nd onto the platform for some one-on-one fighting only to drop down when the 3rd leaps up to follow? I also liked some of the gimmicky bosses like Prowling Magus, the Royal Rat Vanguard, the Executioner Chariot, and the Skeleton Lords as they make up what they lack in difficulty with frenetic shock value while you try to get your bearings. The one on one fights with humanoid bosses are pretty good (Dragonrider, The Pursuer, Lost Sinner, Ornstein 2: Electric Boogaloo, Looking Glass Knight), but the monster bosses are hit or miss. To be fair, I felt mostly the same way about Dark Souls 1 after the Capra Demon, but overall I found a lot of the bosses overly simplistic and easy, which was a bit of a letdown. I’ll get to the DLC later. EDIT: I forgot to mention, the inclusion of the Pursuer spawns in levels was one of my favorite parts of the game. I particularly love that he despawns if you run away like a coward.

I must say I don’t know what the hell people are going on about with the level design supposedly being bad. There are some great levels in DS2, from a gameplay standpoint as well as a visual spectacle. Forest of the Fallen Giants is an excellent starting level, with tons of variety in locale and geometry, lots of places to explore, and good introductory fights. The Lost Bastille has multiple entry points with lots of interesting connected areas that have you wondering how to get up to those ramparts. Earthen Peak has excellent vertical design, with lots of traps, hazards, and surprise ambushes alongside secrets and hidden areas. My personal favorite level had to be Brightstone Cove Tseldora. I love the treacherous one-way platforming, the blocked off routes, the strategy around the spider-torch interaction, and the hectic engagement at the quicksand pit with the spamming mages, basilisks, spiders, and the Invader, on whom I spent one of my Seeds of a Giant Tree and gleefully watched get swarmed by the other enemies. I also thought Shrine of Amana was super fun, as I generally like when melee and ranged enemies are mixed together with lots of terrain to use as cover. I don’t know in what universe that place is more frustrating than the Undead Crypt. The bell gimmick is fine, but it should have been 1 bell per 1 (unbreakable!) statue, rather than swarming you with 5 wraiths who trap you against a rock and spam huge AoE pyromancies at you if you allow a single hollow to ring a bell. Christ that place pissed me off. All in all though, there was a lot of fun variety in the level design, and I found most areas fairly unique and memorable. Blighttown is still undefeated as my favorite Souls level (The Gutter doesn’t even come close), but there are some contenders here.

One aspect in which DS1 obviously mops the floor with DS2 is in interconnected world design. The best thing that DS2’s world design has going for it is its genuine nonlinearity, and the warpable bonfires allow you to switch between paths if you get stuck, but the sense of place and adventure that I had discovering Lordran is definitely not here. I like how much of Drangleic you get to see, and there is a lot of cool stuff there, but the simple branching just can’t compare to the feeling of mentally mapping out the world and its connections in the first game. The game also really struggles in pointing you in the right direction at times, and I overall felt like I was just wandering around aimlessly for most of the game with no real sense of what I was supposed to be accomplishing. There’s no real “aha” moment when you find the first Bell of Awakening, or see the gate to Sen’s Fortress lift up after ringing both. When I obtained my first Great Soul my only thought was “uhhh okay what now?” This is one of the biggest flaws of DS2 for me, as it can be incredibly easy to forget what doors were locked or stumble upon the fork in the road to Huntsman’s Copse when you’re warping around trying to figure out where to go. I played the game blind without much guidance (which I’m glad about), and the game’s own signposting left a lot to be desired. My experience with the beginning of the game best reflects this — I went to Heide’s Tower first because it was the most obvious exit out of Majula, and got steamrolled so many times by the mace-wielding Old Knight that the first Old Knight despawned. I doubled back and found Forest of the Giants, which I did entirely without any level ups because I didn’t realize that I had to exhaust the Emerald Herald’s dialogue to get them, and I thought the game was just withholding to to teach me the value of consumable items, so I blew all of my souls from the Last Giant on bunch of human effigies, Leningrast’s Key, and firebombs.

The DLCs were a great capstone to my experience with the game. Overall, I thought Sunken King > Iron King > Ivory King (I played Ivory -> Sunken -> Iron). Sunken King had the best level design, with tons of verticality, traps, and hidden environmental interactivity. I thought Elana was a great boss, except I think it’s super dumb that she can summon Velsdalt of all things. This is not a complaint about difficulty — I actually thought it was easier to kite Velsdalt than the skeleton mobs — I just think it’s silly and dumb. She’d be one of my favorites if she stuck to skeleton summons. Sinh was good, but I preferred Kalameet from the first game’s DLC. I blasted through the optional area with summons and had a grand old time. My only complaint was the back to back bosses — I’d rather Elana have been at the top of the pyramid rather than the bottom. Iron King had some fun sequences and didn’t overstay its welcome. I was shocked when Fume Knight took me only two tries after all of the hype I’ve heard for him. I just found his moveset super easy to read and I used a pretty low-commitment build, I guess. I actually died to Iron King more times than Fume Knight, of all things (hooray for rolling into lava). Sir Lonely Weeaboo kicked my teeth in about 15 times, though. Ivory King was not bad, but I found it rather tedious. Long gauntlets against sturdy mobs with few checkpoints, and not much available variety between attempts. Also, eternally fuck the Ice Rats, they’re Wheel Skeletons but 10x worse because they damage you just by touching you and it’s hard to even hit them with some weapons. Aava was a pretty good boss, and finding the Loyce Knights with everything unfrozen was a nice gimmick, but the Ivory King boss just encapsulated my feelings on the tedium of the DLC overall. The actual fight is great, but it’s such a pain to fight through waves of Charred Loyce Knights every time just to try again. Frozen Reindeer Fuckland can also go to hell.

I can see why the game has acquired a poor reputation. While I think it makes some great strides on the first game, it does so by subverting player expectations and often without clearly communicating its intentions. I usually don’t have too much trouble picking these things up and adapting, but I also see how the changes put the game in an awkward spot. It’s likely a much more brutal game to Souls newcomers, but it also changes so much that many returning players may be put off. As someone who quite liked DS1 but thought there was a lot to improve upon, I’m quite satisfied with DS2 and will likely be returning to it in the near future. If I had to to sum up my feelings on the comparison, I’d say that DS1 was a more cohesive and thoughtfully designed experience, but DS2 can be more consistently fun and engaging to play on an immediate level. Also I dun care about story in Dark Souls lel, these are 90% pure gameplay games to me. But if I had to weigh in, I thought DS2’s backstory and lore was mildly more interesting. The war with the giants and such held my interest more than the cyclical Age of Fire stuff, but neither are much more than a nice distraction to me anyway.

TL;DR Dark Souls 2 is a great follow-up to Dark Souls, but stumbles in a few areas which are exacerbated by the game’s problems with communication.