Dark Souls 3 - The good, the bad, and the lazy

[Dirty Hipsters]

Hopefully the expansions will contribute some more decent content to the overall experience.

It's also made pvp very dependent on fast weapons, and the estoc currently rules them all because quick successive hits from it will hopelessly stunlock an opponent.

Not actually true, no weapon i know of can get more than 2 light attacks in before the victim can roll out of it.

The reason why its percieved as a stunlock is becuase most dipshits try to attack as if poise worked in 3 like it did in 1.

In reality, spamming light attacks like that just leaves you extremely vulnerable to being parried.

Under ideal conditions maybe, but lag has been a HUGE problem in this game since release, lots of bad connections, lots of phantoms sliding around, etc, and with a slightly subpar connection the estoc can and does stunlock beyond belief sometimes. I've been on the receiving end of it as both a host getting invaded and as an invader, and there are times when I've been hit 4 or 5 times in a row, while mashing the roll button without being able to move. The stunlock is real.

Hell when the lag is bad I've been able to stunlock people with the longsword before, and it's considerably slower than an estoc.

Also, I'm awful at parrying in this game so I have a really hard time punishing R1 spammers sometimes, but that's my own fault.

 

[gigastar]

Hopefully the expansions will contribute some more decent content to the overall experience.

It's also made pvp very dependent on fast weapons, and the estoc currently rules them all because quick successive hits from it will hopelessly stunlock an opponent.

Not actually true, no weapon i know of can get more than 2 light attacks in before the victim can roll out of it.

The reason why its percieved as a stunlock is becuase most dipshits try to attack as if poise worked in 3 like it did in 1.

In reality, spamming light attacks like that just leaves you extremely vulnerable to being parried.

Under ideal conditions maybe, but lag has been a HUGE problem in this game since release, lots of bad connections, lots of phantoms sliding around, etc, and with a slightly subpar connection the estoc can and does stunlock beyond belief sometimes. I've been on the receiving end of it as both a host getting invaded and as an invader, and there are times when I've been hit 4 or 5 times in a row, while mashing the roll button without being able to move. The stunlock is real.

Hell when the lag is bad I've been able to stunlock people with the longsword before, and it's considerably slower than an estoc.

Also, I'm awful at parrying in this game so I have a really hard time punishing R1 spammers sometimes, but that's my own fault.

Under ideal conditions you can just mash parry and if they keep spamming youll get them.

Examples of this can be found here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXBn_1GALRs]. And on the very first invasion no less.

What im not sure of is if different weapons/shields have different parry timings like in Dark Souls 2, but from what ive seen the Cestus is a popular choice. Perhaps more due to that its descreet than any actual differences.

 

[EvilRoy]

I had a pretty decent time, although I found that the background story just wasn't working for me. Although I liked the gameplay the least, I really felt DS2 had excellent implied and environmental storytelling, weaving up some depressing tales for me as I paid attention to changes as I moved up the game. That said, I also found the NPC stuff very VERY hard to follow in DS3, so hopefully on another playthrough I might find some good stories.

The game environments were a nice change of pace, but not super well implemented I thought. I was getting tired of mega medieval settings so it was nice to see other stuff, but I hate towns where there are rows of unenterable buildings, and the archives were just kind of dull. Books were a clever idea though, as was the wax head. I get that there are only so many different environments you can really have, but if we have to have another forest, could it be a boreal forest bordering on tundra like in the far north of Canada? Or maybe a structure you have to reach on the side of one of a forested mountain you have to climb? Could even have shit like hollow grizzly bears hiding in wait. There are more options than 'vaguely deciduous, with a path' to choose from.

Creature and boss design varied, but it was overall positive I thought. For every boring swamp dogman or standard hollow there was a swamp giant and a crow-thing. The Dragonslayer Armour was dull, but his environment was rad - particularly the eclipse was fantastically beautiful. The dancer was eerie and entrancing, but its one hit kill grab was bullshit and unneeded. The big crystal lizards has such excellent movements though. No complaints at all for them, I loved how smooth and natural their movements were - mimicking large salamanders basically. The Deacons were boring, but the area was impressive and challenging.

 

[Silence]

I could agree with most of that, but you forgot a lot of positive things:

-gameplay is best of the series, clean and fast
-bossfights are best in the series (well dont know about bloodborne, but ds1 fell off rapidly, and ds2 ... well.)
-covenants are finally working as intended (mostly), and are great
-pvp finally is the random thing that it should be
-despite a few bugs, is much less buggy than ds1 and ds2 - they dont get fixed
-level design is far better than ds2, and at least the beginning is not as retarded as ds1s.

 

[My name is Fiction]

I could agree with most of that, but you forgot a lot of positive things:

-gameplay is best of the series, clean and fast
-bossfights are best in the series (well dont know about bloodborne, but ds1 fell off rapidly, and ds2 ... well.)
-covenants are finally working as intended (mostly), and are great
-pvp finally is the random thing that it should be
-despite a few bugs, is much less buggy than ds1 and ds2 - they dont get fixed
-level design is far better than ds2, and at least the beginning is not as retarded as ds1s.

I think 2 had the best gameplay.
You can't punish rolls like you used to in 2 and while prediction parries were hard I liked them that way.
I think hornshoeing that every boss needed a 2nd stage turned me off on them.
Not bad bosses just i thing they could have normalized the difficulty spike.
Miyazaki's love of % buff is cool and all but when you had DS1 armor system Rob and Flyne made fast weapons more
fun.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

Feel like PVP is more fun now but harder to organise. No duel arena and covenants like watchdogs just dont seem to want to trigger for me. Plus the servers are janky as and it feels like invasions favor hosts who already summoned a helper. (Maybe they want PVE builds to stand a chance vs PVP builds?)

 

[Erttheking]

Wait Dark Souls 3 is considered a bad Dark Souls game now?

When did this happen? I barely got to enjoy people liking it before everyone started calling it bad. Ugh, well I guess I should just get used to every non Dark Souls 1 game being considered garbage.

We can at least like Bloodborne right?

 

[Sleepy Sol]

Wait Dark Souls 3 is considered a bad Dark Souls game now?

The only place that I've seen on the internet having some really negative opinions on 3 is here, honestly. Isn't really a bad thing in any way, though. But I definitely have to disagree that Dark Soul 3 is a weaker entry in the series. I think it's basically on par with the first game.

I think Bloodborne is better than every Souls game, though. :v

 

[totheendofsin]

Wait Dark Souls 3 is considered a bad Dark Souls game now?

When did this happen? I barely got to enjoy people liking it before everyone started calling it bad. Ugh, well I guess I should just get used to every non Dark Souls 1 game being considered garbage.

We can at least like Bloodborne right?

the honeymoon's over and people are starting to find issues with the game

I enjoyed it fine enough, I did focus more on PVE and never had a problem with the lack of poise, that said I did find myself fighting the camera more than I like in games like this

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Wait Dark Souls 3 is considered a bad Dark Souls game now?

When did this happen? I barely got to enjoy people liking it before everyone started calling it bad. Ugh, well I guess I should just get used to every non Dark Souls 1 game being considered garbage.

We can at least like Bloodborne right?

THANK you! I was going through this thread and was like, "So...I'm the only person that actually likes this game then?" Honestly, I'm kind of just chalking it up to "the escapist" to be honest. This seems like it's becoming a more common thing here, and it's kind of bumming me out.

I like the game very much. I'm enjoying the art, especially the vistas, and I'm loving the call backs not only to Dark Souls, but Dark Souls II as well. I'm also kind of getting confused on the whole "the game is linear" thing, as I have gotten lost in several areas, and maybe I just played the game wrong, but Dark Souls really only had one path through it too. Okay, so you could go after a few bosses out of order, but you can do that here too. Maybe not as much, but it's there.
I'm looking forward to seeing how all this ends, as I have yet to beat it, and I want to know what the DLC will be because I have so many questions, especially involving the parents of the Darkmoon Captain.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

I'd say the bosses feel more balanced than past Souls games and pretty much on par with Bloodborne, but there are still some that are just terrible with some of their attacks. I'm talking about those bosses that seem to have no pause between their combos and nearly all of their attacks seem to have a 360 range with crazy reach. The worst is probably The Nameless King, Champion Gundyr too. Its good that the worst bosses are optional, but its still bad when bosses come across as being so cheap.

 

[Asclepion]

Why is it so fast? I feel like I'm playing Metal Gear Rising.

Sword fighting in Dark Souls was supposed to be very deliberate and tactical, based on knowing when to press the attack or withdraw. The fighting mechanics are great, to the point that I think they're wasted on the Souls games (I would love to see this in an open world RPG with more focus on human enemies instead of undead monsters).

Dragon's Dogma set the standard for movement.

 

[Souplex]

The hatred of shield players continues to irk me.
Blocking takes way too much stamina, and none of the shields seem to have any deflection (The thing where having an attack blocked bounces you back and leaves you vulnerable) in PVP. A lot of enemies have unblockable grabs that take up a vast majority of your health.
They seem to have doubled down on the bullshit invincibility frames of dodge-rolling to my chagrin. Dodging shouldn't have I-frames, it should be a simple matter of "Did the attack line up with you?"
Enemies seem a little too squishy. I know they took cues from BloodBorne's faster combat, but I feel it was to the game's detriment.
The lore is the most straightforward of the series. YMMV on whether you think that's a good thing.

 

[DefunctTheory]

My problems with DS3 are multiple.

-Too fast. Too. God. Damn. Fast. I liked being able to think stuff out and take my time - It let me appreciate the level and enemy design, and actually do different things with different enemies. DS3 teaches you early on to fuck all that noise, and just bum rush everything as fast as you can, spam your attacks as fast as you can, and rolls faster then a tire on a super car. Half the enemies seem to have mechanics based entirely around punishing the player for even trying to get some distance.

-Level design is fine, except that everything feels exactly like a level. I prefer DS1's level design, because you felt like you were in a whole world rather then an arena crafted specifically for a game.

-Everything looks boring. Just eye glazingly boring. The levels, the enemies, everything just looks uninteresting. I actually couldn't find an area I'd seen at least 5 times before in the Undead Settlement because my eyes quite literally stopped focusing. It was all I could do to keep them from actually rolling back into my skull, the darkness of my eye socket being preferable to all this screen junk.

I'm sure that DS3 is a fine game, for people interested in this sort of gameplay. But I liked Demon's/Dark Souls because of the story, the environment design, the methodical fighting, and the spectacle. And this game seemed to be actively fighting me on all fronts.

Actually, typing this, I realized DS3 is still on my computer. Get out of here and stop wasting precious SSD space, DS3.

EDIT: Also, PvP is trash. It's a speed race, which the invader is probably more prepared for then the host. Making a host with an ally summoned already a priority for invasion seems to have been an attempt to balance PvP, but it fails catastrophically, as all it really does is make the worst parts of the Dark Soul PvP system more necessary and rewarding - Namely, abusing mobs and dragging out the fight time until the host just doesn't care anymore and YOLOs. I welcomed the occasional invasion in previous games, but in DS3, it was just the 'playing with my friend' tax, where I had to spend 10 minutes dealing with some cowardly little dipshit who didn't really want to fight, but just wanted to kill my time and make everyone else miserable. I think I spent more time chasing down cowards then I did actually PvEing with my friend.

 

[DefunctTheory]

Wait Dark Souls 3 is considered a bad Dark Souls game now?

When did this happen? I barely got to enjoy people liking it before everyone started calling it bad. Ugh, well I guess I should just get used to every non Dark Souls 1 game being considered garbage.

We can at least like Bloodborne right?

There's, at worst, 3 people in this thread who think the game is garbage, and I'm not even sure the number is that high.

And one of those potential haters is Ezekiel, who might as well hang a sign around his neck that says 'Warning: This User 'Objectively' Hates Everything You Love.' I hardly think most of us should be blamed for that.

I think the whole 'Escapist Users are Elitist Who Will Never Be Happy' thing is getting pretty damn played out. We've had 5 or 6 threads fellating this game, but one thread about some issues people have with it while still enjoying it and suddenly the worlds on fire.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

When did this happen? I barely got to enjoy people liking it before everyone started calling it bad. Ugh, well I guess I should just

THANK you! I was going through this thread and was like, "So...I'm the only person that actually likes this game then?" Honestly, I'm kind of just chalking it up to "the escapist" to be honest. This seems like it's becoming a more common thing here, and it's kind of bumming me out.

Same man. This site is going to have to change its name to The Elitist soon. Everything is always worse than the first game, or pandering, or sexist, or fan-servicey, or racist (I could go on)

I think it's a great game. I really disliked DS2, and for me, having so many callbacks to the first game and DS3 being a continuation of that story was something I wanted. It is a sequel after all. I'm enjoying the faster paced combat, and the lack of poise is something I think has worked in the game's favor. I usually played low equip burden characters with dex weapons though, so that's the playstyle I've always employed. The environments are gorgeous and I really like their maze-like qualities. DS1 never made me feel lost within a location, only in the world as a whole.

Some common things I don't understand...

1. Don't know why so many people are saying the bosses suck. Even the dudes in armor had something to differentiate them from one another (except maybe the Dragon Slayer Armour) Aldritch, Pontiff, Nameless King, the Last Boss, Abyss Watchers, Oceiros, Dancer, Vordt... they all have distinct flavors at least. I'm not saying the fights were flawless or there aren't some meh bosses (Looking at you Cursed Greatwood and Yhorm) but to say they were all boring is something I can't agree with.

2. The Nameless King and the Camera
-Just lock onto the Nameless King and hit the dragon's head. You see everything you need to and by staying in front you rarely ever trigger the dragon's AOE fire attack. The first phase is stupid easy.


I don't know. Maybe I'm just not as demanding as some people are. I wanted a game like DS1 that had a beautiful, dying world to explore with memorable bosses, good music, and solid gameplay. In my eyes that's what From made.

 

[default]

Yeah, Demon's is still the best Souls game in my opinion. Gameplay is a lot simpler and a little chunkier, and some of the bosses tend to boil down to gimmicks, but the world, level design, aesthetic, atmosphere and style are incredible. It feels whole and deep and complete. Not talking from nostalgia either, I only picked it up last year.

I do like DkS3, it's a very good game, but it's just not doing it for me on some level and it pains me to say I doubt I will put more than 200 hours into it at this point. PvP is way simpler than I'm used to in both DkS1 and DeS and feels like a major step down from the high-speed tech-heavy backstab counter punish mindgames of the first two Souls games, but I guess this is the kind of gameplay that was always intended. I think it's better designed as a system overall so the disciplines and techniques of PvE and PvP aren't so vastly disparate, but the skill ceiling and elegance of the game has suffered for it.

World design is fairly tasteful but it's just kind of bland. I feel like they used up all of their best surreal dark-fantasy ideas in Bloodborne (a game I still really need to play). It just doesn't have the personality and richness of DkS1 or Demon's. A lot of the designs didn't do it for me either. The Abyss Watchers felt really out of place, whereas they would be right at home in Bloodborne.


I dunno, those aren't my final thoughts, just what I'm feeling right now. We'll see how the game shapes up with a few patches and a little more content down the road.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

znipz

What I'm definitely not saying is that Dark Souls 3 would be a bad game. Why would I waste 50 hours on a bad game? It's every bit as good gameplay wise as its predecessors (well, for the most part). What it isn't is memorable. Pretty much all the environments feel either bland, generic or like I've seen them before in previous installments. The lore feels for the most part like rehashing and treading familiar ground. As a new installment into the series it feels like it's treading water, a feeling further reinforced by all the wallowing in Dark Souls 1 references. Dark Souls 2, for all its faults and wonky level design, at least tried something different, and did evolve the gameplay by things like power stancing and upping the cap of fat rolling.

As for the bosses, I found that most of them become piss easy after your first new game. I just finished new game+ on my tank heavy armor guy, and I absolutely steamrolled through the game without breaking a sweat. Even Nameless King, a boss which I'd previously complained about as ludicrously hard, I died to only once. Not a single other boss killed me even once, and I beat every single one of them on the first try. Even Soul of Cinder I finished with like 6 or 7 Estus left. This has not applied in previous Soulsborne games. Even in Dark Souls 2 there are bosses I still need to watch out for despite having killed them dozens of times.

However, I feel the need to point out that I haven't experienced the online component of the game, and nor will I. I will not entertain Sony's cuntbuggery of locking previously vital parts of the game behind a subscription fee. So the PvP and co-op features have been completely absent from my games, which might explain why I've gotten tired so quickly. But then again, this applies to Bloodborne as well, and it's still my favorite game of all time, and I feel like I could start a new game of it right now.