lassiie said:
I agree 10000000000% about the Estus mechanic being gone. Honestly, I thought Estus was one of the best mechanics in Dark Souls and was extremely sad to see it leave. One of the things I loved about Souls games is I never felt like I was FORCED to farm. Maybe I needed just one more level so I farmed an area for a few minutes to get the souls, but it never felt forced. Until NG+ I had to farm blood vials at least 5 times which was extremely annoying. Once I got to level 120ish I just started buying all my vials and bullets at the shop in the Dream because at that point blood echoes become useless.
The Estus mechanic wouldn't have worked in
Bloodborne, because the game is way faster and you're required to pop health more frequently.
If you had to take a swig of Estus during a Boss fight in
Bloodborne you'd get killed in like 2 seconds. By giving you the ability to quickly pop a blood vail they were able to make the fights much faster and intense. However, because you're popping them so frequently they couldn't just have them respawn indefinitely otherwise there'd be no risk for consuming health whatsoever. The risk in previous
Dark Souls games being finding that lull inbetween enemy attacks. This hardly exists in
Bloodborne since the game moves so fast.
And I really never found myself needing to farm health untill the very, very end. Every new area drops them at such a generous rate the first 5 times you replay them that you'll build up a substantial supply in no time at all. And I don't know what Yahtzee was talking about with sections that don't drop blood vails, because there isn't a section that doesn't. If it was bullets, sure, since only enemies with rifles or arcane weapons drop that. But in every area there's a certain amount of enemies that will drop vails. Even with the bullets there were plenty of times where even the storage box reached its limit.
The only thing I would criticize is the over reliance on Beast creatures for the Boss fights in the first 1/3 of the game, and the kinda unsatisfying ending considering the game was reaching for cosmic hellish heights. Other than that, this is probably my favourite
Souls game.