Dark Souls 2 or Elder Scrolls Online?

[WittyName]

Well, at the minute, I've played about 40 hours of Skyrim, and nearly 4 times that in Dark Souls, so... I'd say personally, Dark Souls 2 by far.

The first game is probably the best game I've played in years, and I hope the second one is at least just as good.

 

[gaztaseven]

ESO all day.
Dark Souls one was a disappointing romp in easy gameplay with the occasional cheap death.
Elder Scrolls has never disappointed me, and I trust Zenimax online.
No brainer.

Not to mention it's leagues above Dark Souls 2 in content in sheer volume.

I find your opinion hard to take seriously. Name any TES game, it's like baby's first rpg compared to Dark Souls. And as for 'sheer volume of content', the same dungeon copied and pasted repeatedly with small differences (this time, let's make the second corner turn LEFT!) does not qualify as content, IMO.

In case it isn't obvious, Dark Souls 2 for me

 

[IFS]

Dark Souls 2, easily. The first game is one of my favorite games of all time and while I enjoy TES series after playing Dark Souls going back to Skyrim felt bland and mediocre for a while. Besides that I've never been interested in MMO's so ESO really doesn't appeal to me that much. If it was between Dark Souls 2 and the next proper ES sequel (whatever that will be called) then it would be a bit closer as the two series appeal to me in different ways, but Dark Souls 2 would still win handily for me.

 

[RedEyesBlackGamer]

ESO all day.
Dark Souls one was a disappointing romp in easy gameplay with the occasional cheap death.
Elder Scrolls has never disappointed me, and I trust Zenimax online.
No brainer.

Not to mention it's leagues above Dark Souls 2 in content in sheer volume.

It also cost a lot more than Dark Souls 2 for that extra content. I really don't understand that particular argument.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

I'd go for ESO mainly because I'm just not a fan for what DS has to offer, along with disliking it's sadistic punishment difficulty.

That and I know ES lore and next to nothing about DS so I'm not bothering with DS II.

 

[kasperbbs]

I would choose dark souls 2, because i have no interest in MMO'S and elder scrolls online seems like a terrible idea to me.

 

[Fiz_The_Toaster]

Pitting two games that I'm both interested in and asked to choose which one? That's a really hard choice.

I plan on getting Dark Souls II at launch and playing the hell out of that for while, or until I get tired of dying a shit load. Then wait until ESO gets smoothed out a bit then go play that since I'm not bothered by it.

So basically both because I can.

 

[AzrealMaximillion]

Dark Souls 2.

Zenimax Online has stated that they are disregarding the lore of the past 5 Elder Scrolls games so there's nothing there for Elder Scrolls fans. Also ESO being an MMO means that the exploration that people play TES games for will be streamlined heavily. You won't be able to do a lot of thing in a single player TES game that you would be able to by default:

No fast travel immediately.
No pickpocketing every NPC.
No lockpicking and robbing every house.
No enemies that scale with you.
No breaking the game with a single skill maxed.(looking at you sneak...)


There's nothing in ESO for Elder Scrolls fans to enjoy other than a loose adaptation of the series done with an MMO focus.

The subscription pricing also hurts the game for a lot of people. Not because of WoW, but because Guild Wars 2 has done very well with a buy it once and play it all you like system. If more MMOs took the Guild Wars 2 approach to pricing we would see so many of them go F2P.

 

[Maxtro]

Throwing in my two cents. It's Dark Souls 2 for me simply because I'm not going to have to pay monthly to keep playing it.

I absolutely love the Elder Scrolls games, and the fact that they provide tons of hours of content is great. But if Skyrim suddenly required me to $15 to keep playing, I wouldn't be cool with that.

The biggest fault of ESO is that it's a MMO. The only reason I'd consider playing is because it's an Elder Scrolls game, and I'll try my hardest to play it like a single-player game.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

Hmm, choosing a singleplayer RPG over an MMO one.

Although I had my fair share of gripes with Dark Souls in the past, the PC port disappointing me aside, it actually won me over and I pushed through the game and finished it after almost 100 hours of gameplay. Since PC will be the lead platform according to them, I want to give them another chance to see if they manage to pull through so I will most likely grab that game for my PC.

ESO on the other hand, from the footage I've seen from Quakecon, I can honestly say that I was majorly underwhelmed. The animations both in 3rd person and first person were more jenky than Skyrim's one. Add that the fact that they decided to go subscription based alongside buying the box is kinda crazy in my eyes. Way too much to pay so I can have a WoW like quest system and more people in my game. I'd rather go play Skyrim more instead.

So it's kinda up to you OP. If you enjoyed Dark Souls you should go for that.

If you like the Elder Scrolls universe you might want to check that out at least for the initial 30days free time when you purchase the game. It should be more than enough to max out your character and decide then at the end of the month if it has any endgame if you should continue subscribing.

 

[vIRL Nightmare]

Two extremely different beasts that comparing makes no sense. That said, why not both.

 

[Charli]

Nnghgggnnnghhh. I must... keep up...my MMO cred...agh.

But...self flogging via Darksouls...

all of this is painful.

I'm going to coward my way out of this one and just say I don't know. I might give ESO one week to prove itself not that bad. Otherwise I'll wait for the Free to play fairy to arrive and Dark Souls 2 will earn a spot on my steam list.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Dark souls appeals only to a certain type of sadomasochistic player (me being one of them) while the elder scrolls series are becoming more user friendly with each game. On that basis alone, ESO would have been more generally popular on release if it didn't have that 'online' thing going on. But as a fan of the one player rpg, ESO is just a huge, double kick to the balls for me. If i wanted to socialize with annoying kids and sweaty old men, i'd go out my front door for once.

Dark souls 2 it probably is then.

 

[TheSaw]

Dark Souls 2 for me, I loved loved loved the first one, and while I do adore Elder Scrolls games, I already pay for WoW so I'm not going to even touch ESO unless it becomes F2P in the future.

 

[Fat Hippo]

ESO looks pretty awful but Dark Souls 2 offends me.

They called it customizing your HERO!

And they want to make Dark Souls the next Skyrim!

That completely misses the point of the original games. NOTHING you do in the original games is heroic. Hell, you even get laughed at for the idea of being a hero.

The world already ended basically. The best it can be considered is a mercy killing.

They made a few dumb comments shortly after they announced it, but since then, a few more interviews and promotional videos have been released, and I'm far more optimistic than I was few months ago. Like you, I was setting myself up for disappointment, but it looks like Dark Souls 2 will be just as bleak, unforgiving and generally awesome as the first game. So don't discount it quite yet!

 

[briankoontz]

Both games are sure to be disappointing, ES:O looks like a mess of a WoW clone and may not even be a good game, while Dark Souls 2 will almost certainly be a good game but may well pale in comparison with the legendary Dark Souls.

Dark Souls 2 is the much safer bet, while fans of the Elder Scrolls will at least have ES6 to look forward to.

 

[IFS]

ESO looks pretty awful but Dark Souls 2 offends me.

They called it customizing your HERO!

And they want to make Dark Souls the next Skyrim!

That completely misses the point of the original games. NOTHING you do in the original games is heroic. Hell, you even get laughed at for the idea of being a hero.

The world already ended basically. The best it can be considered is a mercy killing.

I could argue that you are perfectly able to roleplay your character as a hero, or someone trying to be one, and depending on your interpretation of the lore you could succeed (if you for instance view kindling the first flame as a heroic sacrifice to keep fire in the world for at least a little longer) that said you will still end up doing bad things along the way unintentionally (killing Ceaseless Discharge for instance, though that can be avoided).

Alternately you could view the term "hero" in its original sense, which was someone who does great things, regardless of the morality of those actions. For example Hercules murdered his entire family in a rage but is still considered a hero. In this case the character of Dark Souls definitely fits.

 

[RJ 17]

Well I'm not a fan of the Dark Souls series, but assuming that I liked the DS series as much as the Elder Scrolls series, I'd go with DS2, no contest.

For starters I'm a console gamer and refuse to pay a subscription for a game when I'm already paying a subscription for online services for the console in the first place. Beyond that, everything I've heard about TES Online just makes it sound horrible. "We don't want there to be any monetization in the game. The reason we've got a subscription is so that there's just a one-time (already Microsoft-levels of incompetent spin as subscription fees, by definition, are recurring, not one-time) payment for 100% of the content. That said, there are going to be microtransactions."

The fact that it's not even being made by Bethesda, but rather just produced by them, is enough of a turn-off from this game. I predict it to be a massive flop, equal to - if not surpassing - Star Wars: The Old Republic.

 

[The_Lost_King]

ESO all day.
Dark Souls one was a disappointing romp in easy gameplay with the occasional cheap death.
Elder Scrolls has never disappointed me, and I trust Zenimax online.
No brainer.

Not to mention it's leagues above Dark Souls 2 in content in sheer volume.

I find your opinion hard to take seriously. Name any TES game, it's like baby's first rpg compared to Dark Souls. And as for 'sheer volume of content', the same dungeon copied and pasted repeatedly with small differences (this time, let's make the second corner turn LEFT!) does not qualify as content, IMO.

In case it isn't obvious, Dark Souls 2 for me

I don't get you guys who say each dungeon is copy pasted. I have been through a good amount of Skyrim's dungeons(over 450 hours played leads to that). Each dungeon has it's differences. I am failing to come up with one dungeon that is the same. I kind of see it if you were complaining about Oblivion, but not really. Those people who think that each dungeon is copy pasted are people who haven't played much of the game.

Unless ESO eventually removes the subscription, neither. I am not a fan of Dark Souls. Maybe it is because I don't know the mechanics very well. I love skyre which is kind of in the same vein in that you die a lot and you know it is because something you did, not because the ai cheated(though a lot of the time it is because you didn't get out of the way of op crossbows, though it makes sense because crossbows were banned for being too deadly). I just don't enjoy dark souls that much. I even prefer morrowind, which I have barely played at all.

 

[Cybylt]

For me, it's Dark Souls 2. I never played Dark Souls 1 myself, due to the PC port being really bad, or so I heard, but I did watch an LP of it and it seemed fun. I heard Dark Souls 2 is getting a much better PC port right off the bat, so I'm certainly interested in playing the sequel for myself.

I have no interest at all in MMORPGs, so Elder Scrolls online I'm completely indifferent about.

Dark Souls 2 is actually being built on PC and being ported to consoles. There's apparently a notable difference in the lighting effects and physics between the PC build shown for the demos and the PS3 version.

Dark Souls wasn't a bad port, it was a straight port which apparently equates to "bad" for the especially whiny subsection of PC gamers. It had all of the positive and negative qualities of the console version since the dev team was admittedly new to pc porting and spent their time ensuring it ran in the first place and introduced no new bugs instead of making it prettier and more technically impressive than the console version which was already a solid game in terms of the aesthetic.

The only issue it has is Games For Windows Live dragging it down, which is absent from 2.

ESO looks pretty awful but Dark Souls 2 offends me.

They called it customizing your HERO!

And they want to make Dark Souls the next Skyrim!

That completely misses the point of the original games. NOTHING you do in the original games is heroic. Hell, you even get laughed at for the idea of being a hero.

The world already ended basically. The best it can be considered is a mercy killing.

Most of that stuff came from EDGE putting in PR nonsense trying to hype up their exclusive article, not from anything the devs themselves have stated aside from a general "Well yeah we'd like our game to be more popular," because who wouldn't want what they're working on to gain more fans?

Go watch the gameplay demos, they're much more telling of the style. Which is to say it still has the same weighty, evenly paced combat, heavy atmosphere and punishment for mistakes and impatience. The Mirror Knight demo was especially nice for showing players with a more normal character instead of devs with a buffed character built to show off one feature.

As for the main topic, Dark Souls 2, no contest.

I've been falling out more and more with TES, I feel Skyrim abandoned just about any notion of being anything other than a walking sim and pretty vistas can only carry a game so far. Combat is pretty slow in Dark Souls and for some that's a bad point but every motion has heft, the attacks actually feel like they connect and so few games actually pull that off. In TES on the other hand melee combat is hardly recognizable as combat. It's two or more guys swinging their swords in the air and sometimes there happens to be a guy in the way. Archery and Magic are fine because they are inherently "light" and suited to the first person view, but there are still games that do both better.

Then there's the fact that it seems impossible to enjoy an Elder Scrolls game as-is. Everyone who's saying "Well I love TES, I put hundreds of hours into it," more likely than not did not play the vanilla version for those hundreds of hours, they played an amalgam of mods piled on top of something that used to be an Elder Scrolls game. So I find it hard to take the "I love TES" part all that seriously. I mean, the mods and everything is fine in itself but doesn't really speak to the quality of the base product.

On top of that, MMOs usually aren't my thing anyway.

I don't get you guys who say each dungeon is copy pasted

The vast majority of the dungeons in Skyrim are Nordic tombs, you spend a LOT of time walking through crypts. Nobody's saying they're like the Diablo setup where it's the same handful of rooms with differently generated tunnels between them, but it is pretty hard to differentiate one from another.

And from reading the comments - I still don't get why people say the Souls series is super hard or has cheating AI or that only masochists enjoy it, it's challenging but it's never cheap, any enemy you face follows the same set of rules you do and can be punished in all of the same ways you can. "Don't get greedy," is a mantra that could take you through the whole game, just have a little patience and you'll do fine.

Damn that ended up being a lot more than I thought it'd be.