bjj hero said:
Digi7 said:
Are you really saying KoA is better than Dark Souls? Fuck, I mean that's your opinion, but JESUS is it misguided. Dark Souls combat is MEANT to be simple and slow, it's not about jumping around spitting sparkles from your magic sword. It's a methodical, more realistic boxing match between you and the enemies/environment, COMPLETELY different from the combat in KoA or any of those games you mentioned. It also takes brains and planning, not just mashing each ability as it comes off cooldown. And no, the game isn't as hard as it is hyped up to be, but in a market of games for dipshits that hold your hand through everything it's still a refreshing breath of air, and worth talking about.
If you think the atmosphere is the only good thing about Dark Souls you are very misguided. It's fantastic in its gameplay, aesthetic, design, amount of depth, the bosses, the enemies, locations, the characters and story. Far better than anything else I've seen in the past few years, and many would be inclined to agree with me.
And many would disagree. I boughtDS on sale for £6, if Id bought it at full price I would have been deeply disappointed. I liked the atmosphere but everything else was lacking. Ill start by sayingI dont do guides and try to get through things by myself. Thats why I thought shields were boken and didnt use them forthe first 10 hours or so. I went straight to the graveyard and found bog standard, generic fantasy skeletons would kill me whether I blocked or not. There were no indicaters I shouldnt be there until much higher level so guessed shields werent up to much in this game.
Combat was a joke. The enemies could be taunted out 1 at a time to be easily dispatched. Most of the enemies didnt need hitting because I could wait until they jumped off cliffs instead. Even drakes that can "fly" were coaxed into falling to death. Plenty of boss enemies would happily sit there while I kill them with 300 arrows. This is short of fantastic for monsters combat and bosses. Most of the ambushes only work because the camera is awful. That town on stilts was awful, Id get chopped up while the camera showed me a board.
Story was weak too. So you are a charecter with no history, backstory, interests, voice, culture, no reason you learned magic/fighting etc... you wake up in a cell then escape. You end up in a magical land where some guy youve never met and have no reason to believe says if you ring 2 bells something might happen. Is this what passes for story now? The world is good. If you take time to read everything its engaging but the story is garbage.
So to me the world and atmosphere were great. The rest was lacking.
I may give KOA a look though.
I thought the indicators were pretty obvious. If one skeleton is capable of killing you with little effort, and you walk into an area crawling with them, I would consider that an indication that I'm not supposed to be there. You're lucky you didn't find New Londo first, you would have thought weapons don't work at all.
I've never heard of someone abandon a mechanic so early but considering the game it isn't a total loss. Ironically, abandoning the use of shields early probably prepared you better for fighting some of the more aggressive and hard hitting enemies in the late game and for PvP combat.
Kitting is a legitimate mechanic for dealing with particularly tough encounters. Heck, entire zones in the game actively encourage it and set up enemy formations to reward caution by kitting. There is one area where, when you access it, the first thing you see is something like 20-ish greater demons (the bridge boss from early game). The game is screaming at you not to rush in. However, the game throws you a curveball every so often and traps you into group combat.
The real issue with kiting is that most enemies have limited aggro range and, when they reach it, become docile momentarily when they return to their original position. That is a huge issue with kiting and well to easy to exploit in certain areas.
Killing enemies like that usually means exploiting pathing and geometry conflicts. While it's a flaw in design, most are usually so arbitrary that to find them without a guide is a lucky fluke. However, it's common knowledge that such exploits detract from a game... they aren't features, yet people use them as such then complain that the game is worse for it. Not to take away from the valid criticism that it is flawed design, but it is your own actions that spoil it for you, the devs didn't make you use it over and over again.
Blightown is the town your thinking of and it has a host of issues that make it the worst area, which is unfortunate since it really nails the oppressive and dread filled atmosphere. Unless your playing on pc with performance mods, you also have significant drops in framerate which makes controls sluggish and combat unwieldy. This framerate issue makes PVP in this area non-existent as it also lags to fuck resulting in constant disconnects. You will never find other players PVPing here.
Isn't that how ambushes usually work? If they weren't exploiting a weakness in your perception then it wouldn't be an ambush. How would an ambush work if you are capable of seeing it in advance? The purpose of ambushes in the game is to keep you on your toes. Multiple playthroughs diminish this impact, but at that point you would be prioritising PVP elements for the sake of leveling, which ramps up the difficulty significantly.
Story is garbled and thinly spread. People say it's good, but it isn't, it's mostly average... it does, however, have a rich lore to uncover. But the story is just for context and atmosphere, nothing more then that. If by story we are talking about the overarching plot that is meant to drive the player forward at least.
