Oooh. Huge Demons’ Souls mojo oozing out of that. Looks great.
Are boss fights in this series still much the same as Dark Souls 1? Ie the bits I didn’t like?
That’s hard to say - what didn’t you like about them?
Difficulty for many of them, being shut in for many of them, arbitrary obstacles to re-attempts (ie distant bonfires behind repetitive sections of less powerful enemies.)
Loosening any of those three aspects would have made it more tolerable for me.
DS2 and Bloodborne were a lot better about everything.
DS2 is great for co-op. Try the boss once, then put your sign down to practice in someone else’s world. If you win, you emerge at full health and healing potions. There are NPCs to summon for every boss too.
I never felt too frustrated except with some optional and DLC bosses.
Bloodborne has pretty fair shortcuts. The toughest bosses are still the giant ones where the camera goes crazy.
I suspect the Dark Souls 3 bosses will have a similar mix as Bloodborne, and I bet we get a lot of shortcuts too.
I hope that Dark Souls 3 includes the password option for summoning that Bloodborne does. I’ve basically done all of Bloodborne in coop and it’s been mostly great.
DS2 pretty much loosened up on most of those. You are still “shut in” for boss fights. Bonfires are closer in most cases and almost all required bosses have NPC’s you can summon for help.
I am not a fan of the seemingly “faster” combat as I don’t want combat to be a button banging fest. I want you to have time to think and read the movements of the guy you fight.
Game Informer: What’s Returning for DS3
Fast travel at the start
Respec
Meaningful NG+
Durability
Summoning and invasion
Hidden walls
Mana bar
Lots of thoughtful improvements returning from DS2, though in general they’ll be balanced to be somewhere in between the two games.
Mana bar, is that something that Demon Souls had? I guess the limited number of casts for each spell replaced this system in Dark Souls.
Yes, Demon Souls had mana that you had to replenish with consumable items.
Targetting March 24th, same date as Bloodborne.
Nice looking Soul Greatsword from an event in Japan: http://i.imgur.com/F4fPpOf.gif
Awesome.
That actually looks like maybe a spell?
Gameplay video with audio (phone recording)
Looks like weapon arts use mana now instead of a dumb counter similar to Bloodborne bullets. I wonder if that was just a placeholder for the early gameplay demo or they changed the design this late in development. You can see him whiff a backstab or two in this video as well.
Can’t wait to fight those knights.
Can’t say I am a fan of item durability unless they fix the frame-rate issues with the PC version.
I don’t remember where I read it, but they are going to be making items quite a bit more durable than before, but the mechanic will still exist. Hopefully it won’t prove a huge problem though, nor (one would hope) would it be tied to frame rate.
Yeah, I can’t imagine they’d make that same mistake again.
Why not? A lot of the game’s mechanics are directly tied to the framerate and decoupling them would require a major engine rewrite which is probably too expensive/would take too long. The obvious solution is to simply up the values, but then you end up with situation like DS1 where durability wasn’t even a thing - equipment had so much of it that it might as well not have been in the game in the first place.
Just because it would be difficult to fix doesn’t mean they did nothing to address it when putting together a sequel. This isn’t a patch or an expansion we are talking about, it’s an entirely different game. I’m not saying you are wrong, but even if all they did was bump up all the values across the board (maybe just on the PC version), isn’t that going to put us in a much better position to enjoy the experience than what they did with Dark Souls 2 (i.e. nothing)? Even at a minimum?
Sure. As I said, it was fine in DS1, if DS3’s durability is gonna be on par with that (or maybe even lower, so that it actually does something) I’m cool with it. But it’s also important to remember that we’re talking about a company which needed over a year to even admit that there’s an issue with durability at 60 fps. And that was after countless proof threads on reddit and people spamming the developers on twitter.
In their defense, they also fixed the wonky jump attack and guard break moves lol. After more than a year, but still.