- Hylebos
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- Fabled Mythic Member
I'm definitely looking forward to following the development of Dark Souls II. The original is easily one of my most favorite games in years, but it had plenty of problems that held it back from achievement the rightful amount of success and acclaim that it deserves.
For one, the game isn't particularly new user friendly. Now, to clarify, I'm not saying that the game's difficulty should be dumbed down or that depth should be sacrificed to accomidate new players, what I'm saying is that the game could do a much better job of explaining the rules and mechanics of this universe. When I started playing Dark Souls, I spent about five minutes looking at all the stats blankly before going online to look up what all of them meant and to try to get an idea of how I should create my character.
It's difficult enough to figure out what to level up in an RPG by yourself, when the RPG doesn't explain itself well, you just feel lost and hopeless. "These guys are really hard, is that because I leveled my Dexterity instead of Strength? Should I maybe have dumped it into Endurance instead? I just don't know!"
Stats weren't the only thing that wasn't explained properly, I still find the Covenant system and Item Crafting system to be fairly ambiguous. It's not a terrible problem to overcome, afterall, I feel that the depth of gameplay is solid, and that giving players the explanations and the tools they need to be able to willingly invest themselves in this amazing game is ultimately trivial.
Another problem with Dark Souls is that the later half of the game with Ornstein and Smough lost a lot of the first half's magic. It felt less like you were exploring new areas and more like you were running around with a check list of all the big baddies that you had to slay. The more dead ends to the world I ran into, the sadder I felt.
One mechanic that I feel would be a perfect addition to the game would be requiring players to fight their way back through old areas that have been upgraded with new enemy placement and new hazards. I recall in Metroids Prime that eventually you had to revisit the Chozo Ruins, one of the starting areas of the game, only to find it haunted by all these Chozo Ghosts, which were difficult enemies that could really only be defeated with the X ray visor, an item you eventually got in that area or got right before that area, if memory serves me correctly.
It would be a nice addition, because once you've gone through Undead Burg, it's the exact same throughout the rest of the game. If as the game progressed the weaker undead soldiers were replaced by black knights or some other type of enemy to keep you on your toes, change things up, make things more interesting, that would be amazing. Or, what if you had to go through an ice area to find some kind of amulet? And upon removing that amulet, Lava flowed into the Cavern, forcing you to take an entirely different path back, fighting new enemies and such along the way?
It would give the sense that the world is truly alive and dynamic, rather than perpetuating the sense that you are in a videogame when Undead Soldiers spawn in the exact same locations time after time after time.