Topic: Dark Souls II The Frustration!!!

[Dark Nemesis]

Ok, 4 days ago, i've started Dark Souls II and i am before the fourth boss and ready to go to the asylum from the frustration. While the game has better graphics, better animations, better music, enviroments, i find the controls, unpolished.

1) When your character get's hit, he's imobilized, until the attack of the enemy ends, resulting in your death. You can't move, roll or recover, something that the enemies don't have to worry.

2) The estus recover animation, takes over 3 seconds, something that makes it useless in boss fights, since a boss in 3 seconds, can do like 4 attacks at least.

3) You have a great sword and attack an enemy and you can't reach him, but the enemy with a small sword, is capable to reach you and pummel your character to death.

4) The enemy lock future is broken. You have an enemy infront of you and push the lock button, but instead of locking on him, it locks on enemy that he is 5 rooms away from you and you can't see it, making your character turn he's back on the enemy, letting him to pummel you to death.

5) You push the square button to use estus and your character stands there, like a statue, after you have almost rip out the button, 5 seconds later, when it's too late, he goes to use estus, letting the enemy beat you to death.

6) Boss fights, no matter what level you have managed to be before the battle and what gear you've managed to aquire, in human form needs 3-2 hits to kill you and hollow 2-1 hits. Also 5 out of 7 of his attacks, they can reach you from one side of the room, to the other.

7) And last, the roll/back step, is useless. Enemies back step/roll, takes them 3 meters away, when your character get's only half meter away.

I don't know, maybe i'm getting really old, but i find hard my self to enjoy this game, even Demons Souls wasn't so frustrating. Your experience people?

[X]

I picked this title up on the day of release and gave it to my bro to play. He shares your frustration big time. It seems clear that it wasn't that well thought out as it's two predecessors were (Demon Souls and Dark Souls). Maybe they were in a hurry to bring out that "other" title they are currently working on.

[Claimh Solais]

Well, the difference with this title is they had a completely new team working on it. Many of them before never worked on the Souls games before. So that could be what happened with it. A lot of people in the Souls fanbase hate DS2 as a result of all that.

On the flipside, though, they absolutely love the DLC chapters.

[GuyStarwind]

Is this your first souls game?

Edit: I see you played Demon's Souls. Idk what to tell ya? To me this seems just like any other souls game.

[JR]

Start putting points into adaptability, if you haven't already. This will raise your agility, which should fix your rolling and Estus issues. When it was all said and done, I think I had 90 points put into agility...from my understanding, it's largely unnecessary to raise it any further than that.

I do feel your pain about your character not responding to the square button when you need it, though. There were many times where I thought I'd start chugging Estus, only to just stand there and have the boss kill me. I think the game is kind of picky about waiting until you're out of an animation frame from when you are attacking or whatever. I learned to start mashing the square button when I needed to flask, but not so much that my character would accidentally take 2 consecutive drinks (which can actually come in handy under some situations).

Also, as far as getting stunlocked...poise doesn't really seem to mean jack squat in this game, as far as I've heard. I remember getting poise high enough to where I could just walk through some of the lesser enemies' attacks, but it also made me not realize when I was getting hit sometimes.

[Dark Nemesis]

Well, i have finished Demon Souls and Dark Souls and none of them gave that much of a pain. I read about agility and it's effect, on the games wiki page. I know that a game has to be challenging, but having some bosses do a kind of attack, that can't be blocked and it's attack area takes the whole screen and if you get hit you'll die or take 80% of your life, is ridiculus. You level up to the max, you can up to that point and have the best available equipment, only to lessen the damage from 80% to 65%. Lol!!

[Super Waffle]

http://chichichichipndale.deviantart.com/journal/Red-Letter-Media-is-making-me-angry-again-471575458

But was it this frustrating?

[Rugal]

Sounds like it's more your inability to adapt to the game.

Don't blame the game for your shortcomings.

[X]

@Dark Nemesis;  You should look into getting the PC versions. Apparently the Nexus Mod Manager now supports Dark Souls and Dark souls II. You should look it up and see what mods they have available for use.

Sounds like it's more your inability to adapt to the game.

Don't blame the game for your shortcomings.

This is only half-right, but I would not have worded it in that way at all. Dark Souls II is far more notorious to play then it's predecessors. Not even being at a campfire will keep you safe from enemy attack. I know cause I saw my brother suffer a freak attack when he sat down at a campfire to regenerate, and was cut down on the spot. That's just one reason on how amateurish the game was put together. There's a reason why they are called safe zones; To be SAFE from enemies.

[Claimh Solais]

@Dark Nemesis;  You should look into getting the PC versions. Apparently the Nexus Mod Manager now supports Dark Souls and Dark souls II. You should look it up and see what mods they have available for use.

The only reason I'm ever worried at looking into the PC versions is I've heard some pretty bad things about those ports. Granted, I've never played them on PC (I own all three games on PS3), so I can't confirm it for myself. So yeah, take my opinion on that with a grain of salt.

But yeah, I'm not surprised about a lot of the problems of play on the game. The latest patch completely nerf'd a lot of the magic builds, with those lightning spear arrow thingies delivering piss poor damage now, and you're only able to carry three of them. Not to mention, for whatever reason, ally AI is dumb as shit now.

The magic nerfing doesn't affect me at all, really, since I only ever play tank or DPS builds in games, but it's pretty sucky still. My brother started up a faith build right before the patch, so now his character sucks pretty bad.

Overall, though, while I find the patch pretty suckish, I also find this game to be particularly easier than the other Souls games. In Demon's, I barely beat the first boss, and I can't really progress past that. And in Dark 1, I can't even complete the Undead Burg. But I'm pretty far into Dark 2, having completed several dungeons (I'm level... I think 92?).

[Dark Nemesis]

Sounds like it's more your inability to adapt to the game.

Don't blame the game for your shortcomings.

If you believe that cheap attacks from bosses who can slice you in half with one move, is inability to adapt to one game, then i tend to believe, that you haven't played the game at all.

[Super Waffle]

Dark Souls is a pretty good game.  The problem is the LOL THIS IS WHAT REAL GAMES SHOULD BE LIKE PRO PLAYERS ONLY GIT GUD xD fanbase doesn't quite grasp how it's cheap, bad game design by any feasible standard.  The Souls series have always been niche novelty games.  The defenders seem to think that just because the game is harder than the average modern hand-holding cutscene-dependent dreck (and you're right, those games are awful), this means that it's impossible for the game to be too hard and it's all the player's fault if they think the difficulty curve went overboard.

Yeah, loading screen.  Tell me about the Mysterious Doll some more.  It's so easy to figure out if you jump off the elevator halfway up to Undead Parish, land on a broken ledge, jump across to another wall, glitch-walk up a steep slope with bad collision detection that makes you question if it's even supposed to be a walkable surface, and curl into a ball in the giant crow's nest while staring at the screen for 10+ seconds, you'll be able to travel back to Undead Asylum and open that entire branch of sidequests.  Also, that random buttress in Anor Londo that the player is required to use in order to progress in the main story.  Your game amazes me with its perfectly logical and intuitive design.  I must have been stupid for not finding it on my own.  And Artorias, just keep doing that neat thing you do where you auto-correct in the middle of your air attack if the player tries to dodge roll a millisecond too soon.  It's not like you're rubberbanding like a motherfucker so the player is forced to constantly play as a daredevil or anything.

And to echo the thing about "adapting," yes, it's bullshit.  The only definition of "adapt" here is "Forego any illusion of character creation or developing your own strategy and just learn the exact way we want you to brute force an area through obsessive compulsive memorization.  And even if you jump through all 500 of our insane flaming hoops hanging over our 5000 moronic shark tanks, we'll copy and paste some more Undead in a corner just off-camera so the game can stay wildly imbalanced in the computer's favor and the slightest hiccup will instantly destroy you. "  LOL YOU TRIED TO APPLY YOUR OWN INGENUITY YOU DESERVE TO BE PUNISHED xD

Like I said, Dark Souls is good.  If you're looking for an I Wanna Be The Guy-esque novelty game.  Just don't tell me the hilariously forced difficulty is a myth and anyone who doesn't like the same genre of games as you is automatically a bad player.

To put this into context, I finished all of Dark Souls, including the DLC that gives you absolutely no indication how to start it after you've paid full price for it.  At one point I even wrote a detailed analysis for one of the game's subplots for someone on YouTube.  http://plus.google.com/u/0/114749005149343181997/posts/6aFnycFX3bH So, no, I'm not just some nub crying because waaah i don't kno how beat gaem.  The only thing I never accomplished was beating Gwyn.  I thought the atmosphere was stunning, the enemy design was really creative, the general sense of figuring out how to progress on your own like an old 80s-90s era game was great, and the entire world with all its shortcuts and interconnections made the game feel like a better 3D Metroidvania than any of the actual 3D Metroidvanias.  ...and then all of that was squandered just so Hidetaka Miyazaki could troll you and make you his personal bitch.  The only reason I never got around to beating Gwyn was because, yeah, New Game+ is even more of the imbalanced crap I thought was bad in my first playthrough.  Not happening.

I avoided DS2 because my feelings on DS1 were already extremely love-hate, and wow that game sounds like a trainwreck even from some of the hardcore fans I've heard.  I mean, Hollow Invasions.  Pandering to online griefers, removing one of the only consistent examples of option and balance DS1 had.  What the fuck.

I bought a copy of Demon's Souls a few months ago.  I'm actually looking forward to playing it.  Most of the feedback I've heard is it's difficult in a good way and its ultra-cheap moments are more limited compared to DS1.

[Dark Nemesis]

The only bad thing, about demons souls, is that if you die, you have to start all over the stage you were playing. One thing, i forgot to mention about Dark Souls 2, it's that if you keep die on a boss fight and don't have a human efigy, to recover, you end up with a 50% less health bar, which in most boss cases, means 1 hit K.O. That means, you'll have to dodge/block every single attack of the boss. Not even Demon's Souls wasn't that punishing.

[Super Waffle]

Yeah, but Demon's Souls is split into Mario levels (World 1-1 etc.), so that doesn't seem too bad.  Or are they long Mario levels?

The one big warning I've heard about Demon's is the leveling system is completely obtuse and nonsensical if you're playing backwards from Dark Souls.

[Gunlord]

The leveling system in Demon's Souls can be annoying. It's similar to Dark Souls, but thing is, in Dark Souls you can level up multiple stats in one go, but in DS you have to do them one at a time, which can get boring.

Also, DeS has some VERY frustrating stages, 4-2 and most of world 5 in particular.