Dark Souls 2 Critique
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Channel: Matthewmatosis
Views: 1,623,985
Rating: 4.5391083 out of 5
Keywords: Dark Souls, Dark Souls 2, From Software, Demon's Souls
Id: UScsme8didI
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 49min 18sec (2958 seconds)
Published: Sun Apr 20 2014
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First off, I have to say, I really enjoyed the review. And as much as I love Dark Souls 2, I definitely agree with a lot of the points he made.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of the blame for the design choices made in Dark Souls 2 can be directly placed upon the boisterous fans that screamed and screamed during DS2's creation.
For instance, in the video he points out the brilliance of DS1 placing the Catacombs and New Londo within reach of the beginning, whereas most considered it an absolute flaw that Dark Souls 1 let you wander into New Londo and especially the Catacombs early on, since many new players found themselves accidentally struggling through these areas, only to give up on the game. I know experienced Souls fans, including myself, enjoyed the indirect difficulty paths, but the overwhelming opinion was that it was poorly designed.
And if you look back on the development time leading up to Dark Souls 2, most fans were ridiculously scared that Dark Souls 2 wouldn't be as difficult, which was due to some half-assed interview with a Namco spokesman who said the words "streamlined" and "Skyrim audience" a few too many times. Fans nearly erupted into tears and threw their juice boxes across the room in a tantrum until it got to the point where gaming news sites posted "breaking news" articles when the directors finally stepped up to the press and announced that DS2 would be as difficult, if not more difficult than DS1.
And so a lot of their attempts to make the game "more difficult" started to turn into "hit tracking" and placing mobs of enemies that the player needs to cheese to get through. Honestly, when your player base has 2 full Souls games under their belt, there isn't much that is going to stop them in their tracks unless you start to throw more and more at them. I consider myself pretty damn good at Souls games; if Dark Souls 2 didn't have hit tracking and multiple enemies in the rooms, I'd probably storm through the game in 2 hours on my first playthrough. It's hard to cater to an audience that wants more and more difficulty, without it devolving into something "cheap", when the technology to develop something like that still doesn't really exist yet (an incredibly dynamic AI and such).
And he was right about another thing (which I gotta say, I called from the beginning); bonfire warping kind of ruined the level design of the game. Fans were defending it from the get-go saying "Lol, you don't need to warp if you don't want to. It's optional, duh!" which I consider a horrible argument. And the game is evident of that. If the developers build the game world around a system that allows you to warp, they're going to give up things like (a) inter-world connectivity (b) interesting shortcuts and (c) balanced and careful bonfire placements, since they no longer need to focus on them. This is also present in Dark Souls 1, as after warping became available to the player via the Lord Vessel, the level design dropped off a cliff.
Torches also had so much potential, but From admitted recently that they needed to remove the lighting mechanic because it made the game near unplayable on consoles. But the few areas where it worked (scaring away certain monsters in No Man's Wharf, finding your way around the Gutter/Black Gulch, avoiding the under water cliffs in Shrine of Amana, and clearing away poison fog) were incredibly cool and I wish more existed. It's a shame that it stayed in the game halfway, enough to give us a taste of what could have been, but not enough to be satisfying. Though I don't blame the designers for this, except for their choice to develop the game on 8 year old hardware.
But, overall, these things will iron out somehow. A lot of complaints (and I mean a lot) were cycling the community when Dark Souls 1 came out; I think it'll take time for our eyes to clear out a bit.
Is this spoiler free?
Once again an amateur on youtube puts the professional game journos to shame in terms of deep, thorough criticism. This is a really solid critique with many great points I hadn't considered. I'm gonna have to start paying more attention to mathewmatosis.
For those curious, there are a lot of boss spoilers.
His points are all valid, so I appreciate that he made this video and I hope the Dark Souls 3 devs can see this feedback.
I do think the game overall is better than he regards it though. The previous Souls games have similar frustrations and problems, but after 3 games they start becoming more apparent.
Dark Souls 1 had the black knight archers in Anor Lando. It had the curse frogs. And it had all of new Londo and frickin' blight town. And the Capra demon. And it was still awesome. I feel the same way about this one.
I like his style, he's very thorough and explains his thought process and reasonings well.
However, I disagree with the first part of the video (still watching the rest, but writing the point down now before I forget anything important, I will edit the other stuff in later).
The first part of the video (~12 minutes) is mostly spent on arguing that multiple enemies are not a good choice for a Souls game due to the combat system, and that enemy placement in combination with the level design wasn't very good. I do agree that enemy placement was lazy in a lot of places, but I do not agree with the general group-heavy focus in DS2 being a problem. I disagree mostly because I didn't have the troubles he's describing. For example, he iterates one point multiple times which is that you either have to cheese groups of tough enemies (by relying heavily on ranged attacks or abusing their AI) or wait until both of them have run out of attacks, and then squeeze in a hit or two. I disagree with this point because simply put that doesn't seem true to me at all. I still played the game by learning the enemies movesets, but now coordination with multiple enemies was mixed in. Simply put I never had to cheese an enemy or use the "wait until both attack at the same time, then squeeze a hit in" strategy. With one exception: The only part of the game where group combat was really a particular problem for me in this game because it seemed badly designed were the ruin sentinels. They all have several gap-closers, but at the same time their normal attacks are very far-reaching due to the long poles they use. This was the only point in the game where I did indeed have to use this strategy of waiting for a good gap where both enemies are recovering from attacks to squeeze in a couple of hits.
I think the group-heavy focus of Dark Souls 2 is one of the primary contributors to why this Souls game once again feels completely different than the other two, despite being based on more or less exactly the same gameplay. I think that's awesome because just as I played both Demon Souls and Dark Souls from time to time, I will have no problem switching back and forth between the three games now because they are fundamentally very similar, yet always feel completely different.
I also heavily disagree with his assessment on the story and lore in this game. I think he simply didn't understand the themes used in Dark Souls 2. For example, he criticizes that as the player character you enter the world and at some point just start hunting the 4 old ones because you're told to do so, but some kind of external motivation is never explained (why you have to get the old souls and get to the castle, that is. It is of course explained that you're trying to cure the curse). Despite being pretty much the exact setup in DaS 1 (which he praises for some reason), this plays heavily into two major themes used in Dark Souls 2. The first is that of lost memories. Most of the characters in the game have forgotten why they came to Drangleic in the first place, but still do whatever they set out to do even though they don't even know why they want to do it. Of course, after a while they all go hollow. The second theme is that of cycles. I won't go into that in two much detail since it's spoiler-heavy, but DaS 2 builds upon DaS 1 lore by strongly implying that many things repeat themselves and nobody can do anything about it. He also makes an overall point that the main plot was less well presented in the DaS 2 than in DaS 1. It's been long since I played DaS 1 so I might be wrong, but I remember having absolutely no clue what the hell was going on with the main plot in DaS 1, just that characters kept popping up who told me what to do. In hindsight the clues were all there, but being ignorant to the series overall before I played Dark Souls, I never figured out how to try and connect them. DaS 2 feels exactly the same way to me there, the clues are all there, but you need to connect them in order to understand the overall main plot. In both games I think you need to read some item descriptions to really understand what's going on with the main plot. In the case of DaS 2 it's probably the item descriptions related to Nashandra. So I can't really agree with him on that point, but I guess to properly judge that I would have to play both games for the first time again, which is impossible. Near the end of the video he makes the overall point that it would've probably been better if the lore and story wasn't as connected to the first game as it is (without spoilering anything), but I can't agree with it since this is Dark Souls 2 after all, not another Souls series. It's natural that a lot of the core lore covered in the second game is heavily related to the first game, and personally I would've been pretty disappointed if the game was even more disjointed from Dark Souls 1 in terms of lore and story than it already is. But that's up to everyone's personal preference, I think. He also contradicts himself a couple of times in this video considering lore. For example, in the ending he says that the game does few things to support the main themes of the game (arguably cycles and loss of memories). Then he goes on to criticize that the game makes a connection to Dark Souls 1 by (*spoiler*) the 4 old ones have a connection to the carriers of the 4 great souls in Dark Souls 1, which is a good example of clearly reinforcing the theme of cycles. The same is the case for the theme of loss of memories. The entire plotline of your main character reinforces one central theme in that by the end you just do what you know is the goal of the game without being aware why you have to do it anymore, as it has nothing to do with curing the curse in the end. It's arguable whether this is intentional by the designers or just a lucky coincidence resulting from bad plot writing, but I see no particular reason to believe the latter, as I doubt that the writers thought that nobody would notice if the main motivation behind the plot just changes midway through the game without no reason.
Next he says he's disappointed with the side characters in the game, and compares them with the ones in DaS 1. He says in DaS 1 the side characters you meet seemed to have their own little stories whereas the characters in DaS 2 just seem to end up in Majula and do nothing. Here he is simply factually wrong. Both in DaS 1 and in DaS 2 some characters just end up in the main hub (Firelink Shrine in DaS 1) and end up doing nothing. Majula has a lot more here since there are a lot more characters in DaS 2 that you meet overall. In terms of other characters with their little lore stories that you meet, there are just as many in DaS 2 as in DaS 1. I don't know what he was thinking there. The other critiques regarding the characters he explains in the minutes afterwards can also be explained by his lack of understanding of the two main themes in this game, particularly cycles and stuff that repeats.
I generally agree with his assessment on the level design. In general the design in Dark Souls 1 was more focused on making sense in terms of the context of the lore and also simply logically with the rules of the world. The Shrine of Winter vs. pile of rubble is an excellent example, and I think the devs really screwed up there. Of course, both Dark Souls and Demon Souls felt more intelligently designed because the levels felt very interconnected. Even in Demon Souls, which had a linear branching setup similar to Dark Souls 2, within each sections there were a lot of shortcuts and loops to be discovered. I agree with him there as well. Small point that I disagree with, though: He dislikes the mismatched geometry in the games, e.g. when you look at the Tower of Flame in Majula, it seems to be very far in the distance. But you can get there by walking about two minutes. I can see why this is irritating, but I don't find this particularly disappointing since it's an obvious mechanic to make the player travel over an entire continent without actually having to fill such a large continent with content. The game tries to fake you into thinking you're traveling large distances, when the distances are really short. I don't really mind this. Dark Souls 1 used this to a lesser extent as well, and there are quite a few of these impossible spaces in the game as well. Earliest example is the Undead Burg, which isn't visible behind the Aqueduct (or whatever that was) when you enter it, but when you walk into the Burg, you emerge on a clearly very large and heavy stone construct which should've been clearly visible from the outside.
He reminded me how sad I was about the wasted potential of the torch mechanic. If areas were mostly dark like they looked in the pre-release trailers, the torch would've been an awesome mechanic which required a nice trade-off from you if you wanted to feel safer while traversing various areas. Right now it's implemented such that going in without a torch is clearly the superior decision for all regions bar one in the game, but the areas are still so often so dark that they cause weird eye-strain for me.
At some point near the middle of the video he criticizes the addition of the agility stat, but he's mostly wrong about it. The stat does slightly increase I-frames if you pump a lot of stats into it, but it's not the reason the game feels so clunky in the beginning. Try going naked and play again, you'll see that it quickly feels very similar to DaS 1 (except your char feels more grounded to the floor for some reason). The main reason it feels different for the first few levels is that there are different weight-tiers now (at least, differently balanced) and most people start out with a semi-fatroll build without realizing it (especially since secondary items that you can switch between add to your overall weight) until they pump enough into vitality or drop some equipment.
I agree with his points about Soul Memory. It seems like a nice idea but badly implemented.
One funny thing: I wish he didn't notice the blood animation thing in boss introductions. I didn't notice it much before but now I won't be able to unsee it. Although I do notice that he's quite melodramatic in places. He says a couple of times that the game is insulting to the previous games resulting some point he just made, and once implies that the makers of the game had such a poor understanding of the previous games that they shouldn't have been put in charge of this game.
Overall for Dark Souls 2 I think it's partially a lot better than its predecessors, but also worse in a lot of places. I don't agree with him that Dark Souls 2 is a huge disappointment, as I have put 120 hours into the game within the first two weeks of release, and I'm eager for the PC release to double that number. But of course, this is going to differ for everyone here, let it just be known that there are a lot of legitimate criticism of the game, and I hope the inevitable next Souls game will provide a good opportunity to do it all better.
Just going to say I started watching this guy a while back and while he does an excellent job of explaining his opinion and how he got there, I often find myself disagreeing with him because he places value on things that I don't or dislikes things that I greatly enjoy or fails to understand a mechanic and comes to a flawed conclusion because of it.
For example his review of the Stanley Parable review he's done I just found myself entirely disagreeing with that one entirely or his thoughts on Dota 2 as a competitive game where he misunderstands the mechanics of Dota such as the high ground mechanic and how it effects lane control and comes to heavily flawed conclusions. I respect his opinion because he can articulate them so well but keep in mind that even well articulated arguments can arrive at flawed or wrong conclusions because of what this guy values in games or what believes "good design" to be.
One thing I just didn't get is that after a certain point, can't remember exactly, fairly late, you can see all the bonfires and so the areas you haven't been to. Which made absolutely no sense to me, I like exploration and discovery, I don't want to know exactly how much of the game is left, it killed a lot of the anticipation near the endgame personally.
Also I don't like how nothing in the description of the bonfire ascetics implies that they'll reset an area, respawning an area's boss (even the final boss!) is a pretty big deal!
I can't believe I had to wait so long to hear something like this, it's far more useful to me in terms of deciding whether or not to buy it than relentless praise. Tell us the worst things! People are more likely to have dealbreakers than dealmakers.
this is a very solid critique and one I actually agree with. I absolutely loathed how many multi enemy fights there were in DS2 and that long journey feeling to the boss fight never happened once for me since the bonfires were so close.
I love DS2, it's a great game, but it definitely isn't as good as the first two Souls games. DS2 just basically feels like a rehash of the first.