New & Upcoming game discussion.

[IskatuMesk]

Dark Souls

Requirements:

> Having a good computer doesn't help the insane frame drop with fraps.
> A very long penis
> Able to make tree noises

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Hmm, how decent (or bad) Planetside 2 actually is? Any specific reason to poke that game?

[IskatuMesk]

It's like Halo PC but larger scale and more hilarious.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Ended up signing up for the beta although odds it's more in preparation when it will be released in 2 weeks or so.

[wibod]

Ended up signing up for the beta although odds it's more in preparation when it will be released in 2 weeks or so.

Ricky you're a faggot, so I'm going to give you a beta key since we need more faggots in our outfit. We're on Thebe right now, I'm ToastedSponge and HKS is KillerLoli

[UntamedLoli]

I don't think anyone clued in that I was referring to getting a beta key.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

I don't think anyone clued in that I was referring to getting a beta key.

I had some suspicions but I didn't want to take it for granted.

Regardless if I did get a beta key or not from you guys, it did feel natural to just sign up anyway since it's in 2 weeks at worst.

[IskatuMesk]

Here is a preliminary review of Dark Souls so far. I'll try to avoid spoilering anything from the LP but given the nature of reviews, it'll be inevitable.


At the end of Demon's Souls, we were tossing around the idea that Demon's Souls was basically an unfinished alpha/prototype for Dark Souls. After about a half-hour/hour into Dark Souls, this idea was surely cemented as fact.

Dark Souls is basically Demon's Souls, but with the extra years of development that the previous game was deprived of. However, these years did little to stem many of the enormous bugs we discovered, especially with the AI. While the AI has more sophisticated scripting in Dark Souls, it seems to use the exact same pathing as the prototype and mobs can still get stuck on flat surfaces and do all the comical things we've come to expect out of Blizzard.

Being on the PC version, I'm at a disadvantage in comparing graphics quality. However, in most circumstances, the animations are fairly improved. A notable instance is that they seem to have copypasted the gargoyle cinematic animations from Latria into Dark Souls for another related cinematic, and they look just as horrible as they did previously. This leads me to believe they outsourced animators and either ran into budget or time restrictions.

The sound quality has also improved, but a large number of the prototype's disgusting sounds remain, which sound extremely out of place as they are quieter than the new sounds and are notably lower bitrate. Also, there's an NPC that seems to have had some serious conversion issues on his audio or something because it's a staticy mess and he's nearly indecipherable as a result.

The gameplay in Dark Souls feels much more fluid than Demon's Souls. The Stability and Poise stats expose some of the more important inner mechanisms of ARPG's, such as hit recovery, but due to the scaling of armor and stats in this game if you want to take advantage of poise you must be prepared to pump endurance and wear the equip load ring to bear the heaviest armor in the game as it becomes available.

Damage types in Demon's Souls were a rare nuisence, with only stonefang really giving us problems. In Dark Souls, however, certain damage types like Thrust are seemingly weak against around 80% of the monsters I've encountered so far, including many of the bosses. My desire to resume spearplay only worked for a short duration before I was forced to rely very largely on Normal weapon types, namely a Zweihander. However, unlike Demon's Souls, I didn't feel particularly claustrophobic with a large weapon and it seems to me the weapon handling is much more balanced and thought out overall. Every time I've tried to switch back to the spear, though, I am reminded just how screwed you are for weapon damage types in Dark Souls.

The Emu said I'd probably blaze through the game given the way I played Demon's Souls, which has for the most part been true. Some bosses gave me minor difficulty, but I've had no trivial amount of time wasted to being simply lost. Dark Souls is a more open world than Demon's Souls, but much of it is progression gated or partially linear. I think I prefer the Nexus to the progression structure of Dark Souls, as some stuff I've encountered has been blatantly too high level for me or simply immune to everything but my zweihander, and I spent a great deal of time wandering around unsure of where to go or what to do. Throw in some vague dialogue, some wrong turns, and I probably have spent half the game so far entirely lost and confused.

The insufferable scaling problems of Demon's Souls are more a thing of the past now, with the numbers and attacks of enemies being overall much more reasonable. Phantom mechanics are also available to offline players, which is an enormous bonus in the game's favor. Thus, in the times I'm not spent being lost or dying to some of the most disgusting encounters I've ever had to deal with, the gameplay isn't too bad at all, if not too easy. However, the dialogue, voice acting, and story take a considerable plunge from Demon's Souls, dropping far deeper into the pit of cliche and narrowly avoiding being branded as a Blizzard game in terms of voice acting.

The ways I would have improved Dark Souls so far would have been to outright abandon damage types at this point, and then improve monster AI and pathing. The AI is still very weak, just not nearly as weak as Demon's Souls. I feel very forced to use the normal damage type because nothing else I have is nearly as effective. Every time I switch and upgrade weapons I'm soon, once more, swinging my two-handed sword for far greater effect. Even the Mirdan Hammer equivalent, of which I abused to great extent in the later quarter of Demon's Souls, is now thrust damage type, leaving me with little options until the later hours of my gameplay where I finally start finding more weapons, but thinking I am close enough to the end of the game that they won't make a difference.

I encounter severe performance issues with fraps and this game. It's a console port, so the performance is expectedly bad, but the addition of fraps into the bag of dicks causes serious staggering crawls and strange 15fps lock periods. This game deserved to be a native PC title.

Furthermore, the game abuses blur, which makes it hard to read for me, and several portions abuse Shader tone-mapping that causes massive eyestrain and dramatically degrade the quality of the otherwise reasonable graphics (reasonable, with a bunch of hacks installed, anyways). The Depth of Field seems a little offputting, working against the game's sense of scale. Overall, the post processing hurts this game more than helps it.

Overall, Dark Souls is certainly more refined, but is often times even easier, than Demon's Souls. The lack of attention to the AI is still amongst its weakest points, but as no game released in forever has had decent AI, this isn't something that comes unexpectedly. Nonetheless, it's still disappointing. Insert desire that this game was moddable and wasn't just a console port.

Dark Souls is one of the better games I've played this year, but as I've played largely incomplete alphas and THQ garbage, it isn't competing against much. It remains to be seen how the game will end, and I suspect in tears of butthurt.

[UntamedLoli]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqL3-n2-3J4

[Pr0nogo]

ew

[IskatuMesk]

The youtube slideshow I get courtesy of goigle is like the ingame experience of waiting for stuff to happen.
Funny how all of the western devs don't have the balls to hire animators for actual cinematics in any of their games, you just get people like Blizzard with their big wallets and brainless "choreography".

Even Darksiders copped out and it had a reasonable intro cinematic.

/e

Ah wait, there's bioware. They made some okay cinematics. But then again, that was Star Wars.

[Pr0nogo]

Jesus Christ, that was probably one of the most pointless, retarded cinematics I've ever seen, and that's including Conan. I couldn't decipher a single fucking thing.

[IskatuMesk]

Welcome to the world of media. I'll let you know what I think when I direct download it because I can't watch youtube because people are still using adobe garbage in 2012.

[Pr0nogo]

Random shit just happens for nearly six minutes. It really isn't worth your time.

[UntamedLoli]

It's based on in-game events that have been progressing since 2.0 was announced. Everything actually has a purpose.