Love the game, but I also love Dark Souls 2.
Was wondering why Dark Souls 2 Is loathed by some fans and Dark Souls 3 is venerated by the those same fans?
I’ll compare some of my main observations.
Environment: Dark souls 3 has incredibly cluttered environments in a good way. Every room has stuff in it, corpses and furniture and little details that make it feel alive, claustrophobic and horrifying. Compare that to ds2. So many rooms are just empty, empty boxes with nothing in them. This significantly changes the atmosphere of the game and once you notice ds2 is just empty rooms you can’t unnotice it.
Combat: Actually ds2 was pretty good except for hit boxes. But ds3 borrowed most of the good changes from ds2 anyway and dropped the (imo) bad ones like healing stones. The bad part of ds2 combat was definitely soul memory, an absolutely horrible mechanic for longevity of pvp in non designated pvp zones.
Vibe: already talked about this a bit in environment, but ds2 feels like a Skyrim adventure. It isn’t scary. Hollows are just zombies and there’s never any really scary moments or eldritch creatures, it feels sanitized almost. Ds3 had a lot more eldritch horror and that helped complete the vibe.
Bosses: so many of the bosses in ds2 are just bad or cut and paste. So many. Both rat fights are dumb, cut and paste dragon riders, so many fights are just “big knight with big weapon”. All the best fights are either the end of the game or the dlc. Contrast that to ds3 where the bosses are challenging but fair and have much more polished themes, more varied movesets, more lore, and are just in general more fun. The only truly bad ds3 boss fights imo are the one dragon that gets one shotted and wolnir.
Enemies: the game design philosophy of ds2 is just “put tons of enemies with huge lock on ranges everywhere”. Much less polished than ds3 and it feels artificially difficult. This was somewhat fixed in sotfs but not enough.
These are just some of the reasons, I could probably list a few more.
The first half of Dark Souls is one of the best games ever made. The 2nd half is unironically worse than Code "bro look off of a cliff and find a hidden path lmao" Vein. In this way, I think DS2 is a truer sequel to DS1. Incredibly high highs, unbelievable lows. DS3 oftentimes feels too polished - if that makes sense. Weird and offputting is necessary for these games to work. Not to say DS3 is bad, but it doesn't really feel as rotten (positive connotation) as I think it sometimes wants to.
Bloodborne is the true superior sequel to DS1 because it actually represents a leap forward in both mechanical and aesthetic design. Nasty game, love it.
Just gonna interject with Jacob Geller's DS3 video https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=lnAWQz34PJs
Dark Souls 2 was a you-had-to-be-there-at-launch situation. It was an entirely different experience of a game when there was no meta. I spent days in the royal rat covenant sewer area pvping, i was the rat king of the sewers, farting out poisons. There were these crazy builds you could make like invisible giant club, 1 ammo one-hit-kill go for broke magic build (i think the spell was called hex?), poison farts, and a fuggin ben hur horse boss lmao. It also had a very unique aesthetic and I liked the story as a cautionary tale about marriage. Places like Heide's Tower of Flame felt like fully realized dream landscapes, almost Daliesque in a way. In terms of lore its my favorite cause of Aldia and his content, he really elevated the series. There's also a giant dragon the size of a building that's hard as hell. Dark Souls 3 just felt like it wasn't trying to do anything and I barely remember any of it. The most fun online pvp I've had in a Fromsoft game was Dark Souls 2 cause of the whacky builds. It's like the Temple of Doom of the franchise and I like that.
I wish I could articulate Dark Souls 2's aesthetic and vibe but it's hard to put into words.
Dark Souls 2’s aesthetic and vibe
Not sure if it’s the right term but “dreamcore”, or at least some sort of dreamscape. Majula definitely feels like someplace you’ve visited. It’s “out there” but in a very grounded way imo.
Dark Souls 3 just felt like it wasn’t trying to do anything and I barely remember any of it. The most fun online pvp I’ve had in a Fromsoft game was Dark Souls 2 cause of the whacky builds
fucking thank you, DS2 pvp was so much more enjoyable to me. the games overall weird vibe was just a lot more interesting in general.
Dark Souls III has a more consistent level quality of content that seems to prevent it from ever sinking to the level of something like Bed of Chaos or Frigid Outskirts.
I think the something that gets a lot of people is how poorly the maps mesh together when compared with DS1. Admittedly some of it is a stylistic choice, such as the transition into dragon's aerie, but then you get stuff like the shrine of winter where the road being blocked by a small pile of rubble means that the player has to go on an adventure, killing four ancient kings just to open a side door.
Dark Souls 2 was made by a separate team and in many ways seems to completely misunderstand what made Dark Souls good. Dark Souls 3 also does to a certain extent (the level design was, in certain ways, more similar to Dark Souls 2 than 1, for example) but it is much more in line with the first game.
As for me personally (stepping out of any pretense of objectivity here) I just thought Dark Souls 2 felt somewhere between an elevated fangame and a soulless cash-grab. It seemed to think that Dark Souls was cool and popular because it was hard and you die a lot, so the best way to make a level in Dark Souls 2 is to make sure the player will die a lot and find the experience frustrating. I'm sure many of the fans of the original game will agree with me when I say that that is not why Dark Souls was cool and popular. Dark Souls was cool because every time you die, you know exactly why. You fucked up the timing, you didn't pay attention to what the environment was trying to convey to you, you didn't react fast enough, you made a mistake. The vast majority of the times I died in Dark Souls 2, until playing it for hundreds of hours and knowing all the ins and outs, I would just stare blankly at the screen and go, "Okay, yeah, I guess the game just wanted me to die. Fair enough."
If I want to play that kind of game, I'll play I Wanna Be The Guy. And don't get me wrong, I (being in the vast minority of people who live on this planet) like IWBTG and other unnecessarily, intentionally unfairly difficult games. But there's a place for them, and it's not in the Souls series.
The thing about souls games, that DS 2 didn't understand, is that they aren't hard on purpose as a gimmick. The difficulty was part of the world building and immersion factor. The story was about a hostile and dangerous world and the game's difficulty reflected that. That's a major issue I have with the sequels that it never seemed to understand.
I don't get the artificial difficulty complaint about dark souls 2, I don't know if the mechanics of it gel with me better than the other games but I didn't find any of the base game hard when compared with the rest of the series.
Fair enough . From Software games didn’t really click with me until bloodborne and then I went back and played 3 and the rest of the series.
I played scholar of the first sin and thought 2 was pretty good when played in that experience (not as good as the others, but still fun) however you could definitely tell Miyazaki was hardly involved, that’s very apparent.
Another reason that people like me who hated Dark Souls 2 loved Dark Souls 3 is because Dark Souls 3 shamelessly pandered to people like me. That game is absolutely steeped in "remember dark souls? you're so cool for having played dark souls enough to recognize this area/callback/character/lore." It gave the world and story set up by Dark Souls a conclusion that it absolutely never needed and that no one, not even Dark Souls fans like me, ever asked for. And it relegated the entire Dark Souls 2 section of the world to a tiny transitionary swamp right before they brought back motherfucking firelink shrine.
Lol I can imagine playing the game felt twice as awesome if you’d played and beaten Dark Sould 1 before 3. He’ll, Dark souls 3 is my favorite Dark souls game without even having played 1 first. I can only imagine how cool it was if you had thoroughly trounced Dark Souls 1
My fiancé wants to get me a Ps5 this Christmas (the digital one) and I’m very much looking forward to playing the Demon Sould remake. That’s the main reason I told her PS5 over a series console. Shit looks amazing
The dark souls 1 callbacks kinda made me dislike some of DS3 originally, I really didn't like the first game, (partly because of the pc port being awful), so when you like return to anor londo, I was like, "shit, here we go again!"
so when you like return to anor londo, I was like, “shit, here we go again!”
Same, except when I was like that, it was with a massive smile on my face.
But yeah, I definitely understand that people who didn't post on forums dedicated to dissecting Dark Souls lore before Dark Souls 2 was ever even thought up would be less amused by such pandering
Horrible enemy placements, hollowing that reduces your health to half (ds1 doesn’t do this, ds3 has embers which just increase health by 30%), extremely low estus in the start meaning consumables are mandatory, enemies are just fast while the combat is slow so they can really surround you
Seems to me that Dark Souls 2 just tested crowd control as a skill more than DS1 did. Which seems fair to me? That's a valid skill to have in this sort of game.
I think combined with the agility mechanics especially early game fighting crowds is just not fun. They do lots of damage and stun you. Better to fight a few fewer enemies where tactics play more of a role as opposed to using cheesing as a strategy, imo, like in ds3 where you fight maybe two lothric knights at once who have varied and interesting moves
That's fair. And your point about Lothric Knights does make me realize something else- for the early game, they're a tough enemy that's also a lot of fun to fight, and I can't really think of any similar, particular enemy types in DS2 that I particularly like fighting. Like, there's very few enemies I can think of that I hate in particular, but a lot of the enemies just sort of merge together in my head. They're a bit samey, I guess.
And fair point about the early game. In part because of the Agility stuff and in part because of the level design, I've often said that DS2 is a reverse DS1. That is, in DS1, the first half is phenomenal and the second half sucks, but in DS2 it's mostly the opposite- I don't think the bad parts of DS2 are as bad as the bad parts of DS1, though.
Yeah, for me the early game of ds2 was just not fun especially because I started as deprived which was a mistake (I had beaten ds1 and ds3 before) because unlike the other souls games deprived gets literally nothing and I didn’t know about the hand axe so I had to do the whole area with a dagger. Besides that though just fighting enemies doesn’t feel that fun to me in ds2. I think ds2 had a lot of improvements over ds1 but in many ways it also got worse, so idk. I don’t hate the game, I just don’t like it as much as 1 and 3. Hopefully Elden ring will be a banger.
Dark Souls 3 plays the most like Bloodborne, the actual superior FromSoft game
DS2 is fine though
Bro why does this discourse follow me everywhere? I can’t go anywhere without seeing constant DS2 vs DS3 debates wtf is happening
I don’t know about your case, I just love grim dark fantasy, and especially grim dark fantasy rpg video games.
So of course games like The Witcher 3 and Dark souls Series fall into this category. I love talking about my favorite pop culture things, that’s about it.
Yet to play them so I can't really comment. There's a great youtube video from matthewmatosis that breaks down the faults with DS2, which I really enjoy. imo, DS1 is this great self-contained story that didn't really need a sequel. In my timeline we would have jumped to bloodborne and had another armored core game instead of souls.
Don’t know if I can agree with that fully, as I love Dark souls gameplay and love that they did some sequels. Hell, I’m one of the people that actually loved number two, but...,, you can definitely tell 2 is rushed in some way that number one isn’t and even I’ll admit my love for the game might come from the fact I played the beefed up, and mostly fixed “scholar of the first sin” version and never played the original.
Respect your timeline though soros, you’re a smart cat.
Yeah I heard the DLC fixed a lot of the problems. Anyway that's just my take. They're good games though, just not as great as DS 1 imo, but that game was kind of like lightning in a bottle in a way.
One of the problems with matthewmatosis' review is that his complaints about the combat all revolve around him not grasping how the game expects you to deal with multiple enemies. E.g. he complains that the Prowling Magus fight makes it so that you can't see a bunch of the congregation if you lock-on to the priests at the back of the church. A lot of the game's early encounters are supposed to teach you to turn off lock-on when dealing with multiple enemies, but a lot of people just brute force these fights by pulling individual enemies away using ranged attacks.
What? The prowling magus is like Pinwheel 2.0. Who even complains about him?
As I mentioned earlier in my comment, the DS2 review by YouTube channel, matthewmatosis uses Prowling Magus as an example of "artificial difficulty" alongside the twin dragon riders you fight midway through Vendrick's castle.
Killing Prowling Magus is borderline a hate crime though and if I have a spare aesetic I usually refight the old iron king instead so that his death doesn't weigh on my conscience. :)
As someone who has never played it, isn't it because of too many Dudes in Armor?
That was a problem I noticed. Too many bosses in are knights in armor
Gonna be honest dark souls 3 is one of the most disappointing games I've ever played. It's not bad but it's not what I wanted.
Really? I loved that game. It and bloodborne alone absolutely hooked me on from software games and brought from software up into my top 10 gaming companies of all time.
The dark fantasy atmosphere was stunning.
To each his own I guess. I’m sorry you didn’t like it friend
The funny thing is I think Bloodborne is far and away the best of those types of games. One of the biggest reasons I disliked Dark Souls 3 though is that there was too much Bloodborne in it. Either the wires were getting crossed because it was developed while Bloodborne was coming out or Fromsoft decided that's just the direction they want to take the series. Combat is faster, enemies stunlock you more, you have way more stamina. Bloodborne isn't really Dark Souls 2.5 so I enjoyed the change of pace but I don't enjoy it when it's added into a series that's kind of famous for forcing players to be slow and not rush things.
I also don't like how much of the game is "remember dark souls???? Remember gwyn? Remember this place?" It just feels lazy to me and it kinda makes me butthurt that there's barely any of that fan service for Dark Souls 2 because I consider it to be the overall best speaking purely of gameplay.
Nice. Glad someone else doesn’t hate dark souls 2. The DLCs were absolutely amazing
Yeah I think the DLC in ds2 is the best content in the series although I've never completed the ringed city
Ringed city is actually my favorite in the series, unless we are also counting bloodborne then that would belong to “The Old Hunters”. Still the Dark Souls 2 DLC are also great
Most of the ringed city is pretty bad but the boss fight at the end with
spoiler I guess
Slave knight Gael, after he kills the last of the pigmy lords.
Is an overall high point of the series, and probably one of my favourite boss fights in any videogame, right up there with the Grigori fight in dragon's dogma.
It's really interesting how every From game seems to have its DLC be the high point. Such good level design, combat, and boss fights in all of them.
Though I feel like the difficulty can also go up a BIT too high in them. I've only ever beaten Orphan of Kos once, and I've never beated Gael.
I like to look at the number and proportion of bosses that do something interesting in the base game (not including bosses that do the same interesting thing as another, like have many of themselves, or have adds)
Dark Souls: 13/22, 59 %
Dark Souls 2: 11/32, 34 %
Dark Souls 3: 10/19, 52 %
Of course this is subjective, but I bet even the few huge fans of 2 would arrive at similar numbers. I mean, the last giant has like 3 attacks, and you just fight it in a boring room, at least in 1 they put you on a bridge or something when you fought the boring easy bosses.
I also have a personal hot take: I dislike the direction they went with the story and the PVP in the later games.
But can you roll off the Sens fortress invader spawn to swing on one of those swinging blades in DS3? Didn't think so.
I agree that the added weapon variety and polished mechanics make the PVP combat itself more fun in DS2 and DS3. My problem with them is that they made the PVP too balanced, too focused on fair duels. It took away from the unique hunter and prey feeling DS1 had.
Personally DS2 was my first souls so I still like it about the same or even more than DS1
Miyazaki was not involved
Lore is disconnected from the first game; compare to DS3 which has tons of callbacks to the original
Trash mobs are everywhere, enemy placement is crap
Said mobs also disappear after dying so many times; this is a pain when farming souls
People will say soul memory but I can’t recall what that is off the top of my head
Bosses are comparatively easy
Covers a few common complaints about DS2
E: to be fair, doesn’t speak to ds3’s merits as a sequel but I believe they’re related
Soul memory was a mechanic they implemented, (rather poorly imho), to stop people twinking low level players.
Basically, every soul you collect increases a score, at certain thresholds it would push you up a multiplayer bracket. Meaning players with high soul memory could only interact with other high soul memory players. This helped to balance out PVP slightly by making it so someone with a low level but late game gear couldn't invade early players, ( killing the four main bosses for the shrine of winter ups your soul memory to approximately 1000000), but it also makes it nearly impossible to do a significant amount of jolly cooperation because the amount of souls you'd gain for killing bosses would rapidly space you out of the range for helping other players at a similar stage as you.
Okay, now I remember why I put it down. I couldn’t sunbro properly, and this didn’t gel with my STR/FTH build. Going back to replay a boss fight was nearly impossible.
I like to sunbro in dark souls and it really frustrated that soul memory got in the way of me lending a hand.
Soul Memory would have been a much better mechanic if they had it work off of souls that you've invested in some way rather than just souls that you've had (and maybe also checked for the level of your weapons the way DS3 ended up doing). That way, you could intentionally lose souls to keep Sunbroing, and also a regular player who loses a bunch of souls by accident doesn't end up being as heavily penalized.
