The trailer (now on youtube in 720p) Obviously, consider the site that is hosting the video and read the comments at your own peril. The official website. Doesn't add much at the moment except Another Damn Pendant and that it seems they are aiming for PS3, 360, and PC releases at once. Eurogamer confirms that last bit. This site has the official press release, and a little more information. But not much.
Oooh! Super exciting! But it does raise a question: why Dark Souls 2? I thought Dark Souls was, effectively, Demon's Soul 2, so why does this one get a "2" in its name rather than a new name? Wikipedia isn't much help; I didn't see much on there about the relationship between Demon's Soul & Dark Souls.
Sony has the rights to the Demon's Souls name and franchise, not From. What is now known as "Dark Souls" was originally conceived as a sequel to Demon's Souls, but because of IP fuckery and Sony being awkward bastards From couldn't do that. So, Dark Souls. This is also probably why Patches is no longer called "the Hyena" but "Trusty" and various other continuity weirdness. That said... My body. Is it ready. Edit: Fuck. Yes.
YOU HAVE DIED (and gone to Heaven). If they release on all platforms at the same time that is seriously going to ruin DSII's chances of being BF's game of the year for three years in a row. They gotta stagger that shit, game the system. MILK IT.
That trailer looks fantastic. I doubt I will ever finish either Demon's Souls or the original Dark Souls, but I'll buy this anyway. :) I am curious about who that cloaked lady might be. I hope this game will have more character interaction than its predecessors!
and then the next time you see then, they are hollow and coming at you with sword! Love the character design in the trailer. The guys looks like how I would imagine a well equipped, realistic badass would dress. The character/armour design of Dark Souls is really good, hope it continues
Oh not me, I hope that the sequel forces us to wear a skirt again for the entire game if you want the best stats <25-50%%.
I have the same hopes for this that I had when I heard they were making another Souls game after Demon's Souls: please, oh please, oh please, don't dilute it; don't water it down, don't homogenize it; don't make it 'more accessible'. 98% of the games released today are little more than guided experiences (Fable II even had a trail of breadcrumbs FFS!), please let us have one series that doesn't want to hold our hands. please let us have one series that requires patience and thought. This EDGE review captures perfectly why Demon's Souls is one of the best games I've ever played: More of the same please :)
Good news, though hardly surprising after the success From has had so far! I wonder if this will be a true sequel, plot-wise?
One thing I hope they crack this time is correctly marketing just what "DARK SOULS... YOU DIED.." means. They need to get beyond the whole "hur hur Dark Souls is really punishingly hard just because" business. I am a 35 year old dad, with 3 kids and a full time job. I am not an uber gamer. But I REALLY enjoyed dark souls. The difficulty is in the learning - enemy patterns, weaknesses etc. Nothing to do with button mashing, or making perfectly timed jumps.
I wouldn't honestly mind. I was half hoping this would be announced for the Vita so there'd finally be an overpowering reason to get one.
Dark Souls is only a spiritual successor to Demon's Souls, not a sequel. It isn't set in the same world and it doesn't continue the story or anything like that. It's an important distinction, because as exciting as "more Souls" is on its own, the most exciting thing about this announcement is that it's more Dark Souls and the story possibilities are fantastic. And that's also the part that wasn't necessarily assured; it could have easily been a third X Souls game unconnected to the other two or even a new King's Field game, which the creators had been kicking around at some point.
Ok, clicked through and watched the trailer. Speculation incoming: - Could "forever without light" mean that this is picking up assuming the dark lord ending? - Could we be interacting with more humans in this one as a result? - Some of the environments in the trailer look familiar. I see a Depths and a Kiln, maybe. - The Kotaku article says it takes place in a "new" world, but if you click through to the actual quote you find out that they were just pulling a Kotaku and the actual quote is "unfamiliar." Could this mean that most or all of it takes place outside of Lordran?
You can potentially find out in a fortnight. Edge have seen it and it's their cover story this month (20th). They claim exclusivity so I don't know if the information will be elsewhere. Miyazaki is gone and the new directors want to make it more direct and accessible if this is to be believed. Regardless, exciting news.
Tentatively excited. There are so many ways this could go wrong that I'm going to wait and see on more info before going in with a "day 1" claim.
Hm. I guess we'll have to wait and see what that actually means, because it's pretty vague. It could be a good thing or it could be disastrous.
Sounds great. Big parts of the two games are needlessly obscure vs simply deep or complex, and the two examples they give (covenants, world tendency) are where that kind of refinement is most necessary in order to let people enjoy the cool things they've thought up.
Miyazaki isn't actually gone. He serves as supervisor to Shibuya and Tanimura, and is still the primary writer of the lore/backstory/plot of the series.
That I did not know. Makes sense, though, and I understand one of the guys taking over comes from Monster Hunter, which I believe inspired the Souls games. Despite my earlier phrasing, I agree. That little snippet by Edge is vague enough that it could mean anything, but they admit the things he talked about were reasonable. Edit: Things like the weight system change for Dark would be a good example.
Yeah, I'm not too concerned. I don't really see the guys who made Dark Souls screwing up and making Dark Souls 2 an Elder Scrolls clone. Also can we have a Souls subforum, please?
I'll just post the first few entries from my wishlist for now: Start every class at level one. It's more intuitive and it would allow for some variety in SL1 run builds. Double up crafting supplies. I'm thinking normal titanite just for normal upgrades, blue for magic, enchanted, and lightning, white for divine, occult, and fire. This way you could actually make multiple weapons of the kind you want instead of scrounging for every last scrap you can find of the color you want while the ones you'll never use pile up in your inventory forever. Make raw weapons work. Raw weapons are a cool idea but useless as implemented. They should be much higher base damage and very low or even no scaling. Make armor upgradeable in any line. Just the way shields already work; if you upgrade it with fire, it should add more fire defense. This would give you far more wardrobe options and encourage the cultivation of multiple armor sets for different situations. Upgrade shield stability on every upgrade path. So let's say you're not budging your intelligence from the starting value and you have nothing to do with all that blue titanite you've found. Well, you can upgrade a shield with it and get a decent level of magic defense out of it. Cool, but there's on problem: the most important stat for any shield is stability, and that only gets better with normal upgrades. Lame. This one really just seems like an oversight, so please fix it From! Keep the PtD/AotA-level scaling for elemental weapons. This seems like a no-brainer because they really did do a good job with that nerf. Increase base damage/decrease scaling for magic and divine weapons. All of the "scaling elemental" upgrade paths are more viable post-the elemental weapons nerf, but they still don't really come into their own until pretty high levels of intelligence or faith. That's really ok for Enchanted and Occult, which are meant for those kinds of builds, but as it stands there's just no point in ever taking magic or divine weapons higher than +5. Well, divine does get used for the added bonus of getting through the catacombs at least, but it's still not inherently too good for any build that I know of, and magic seems literally useless compared to enchanted. More useful dragon weapons and more broadly useful boss weapons. Dragon weapons are cool in principle but in practice there are only a few really good ones. So why not give us a few more, instead of the likes of the Dragon Greatsword and Dragon King Greataxe, which have ludicrously high stat requirements yet no scaling and are lackluster as a result? Similarly, I appreciate that boss weapons are mostly intended to fill niches, but as it stands I think those niches are too small. Less awesome unique weapons for sorcerers. As much as I love them, sorcery builds currently have an embarrassment of riches in the unique weapons department; all three are excellent and they use different upgrade materials to boot. This is another thing that keeps magic/enchanted weapons down. Have less of them, make them less good, or make them use the same upgrade materials as each other (and not twinkling). More awesome unique weapons for clerics. Of the current ones one is terrible and the other two are hard to make a case for. Faith and intelligence should both have access to weapons that are somewhere between these two extremes. Make poise more transparent. I'm not asking to see the hidden poise bar every time I get hit because that would get tiresome in a hurry, but just being able to have some kind of number associated with the amount of poise damage a weapon does would be tremendously helpful. The existing knowledge of poise damage is the result of many hours of testing, but it is still nowhere near exhaustive. It's a really important part of the game, and I think it would be good to expose it a little more to the player. Make all the covenants meaningful. Even if it means having fewer of them. We don't need any more Ways of White and Princess Guards. Give the covenants more to do. Wouldn't it be cool if, for instance, there were covenants that were enemies with each other and had PvP battles? What if NPCs reacted to you differently based on which covenant you were in, instead of only caring if you were in their covenant or not? There's lots of opportunity to flesh this out, I think. That's it for now. Just a few things, like I said.
My list is short, everything could more or less remain nearly the same, except: 1. Fix PvP 2. Ship with appropriate high resolution graphical options for the PC port 3. Replace Pyromancy with something interesting
That's enough for me to care zero. Games are about the people who make them not about their brand, no matter how hard they try to persuade you it's the opposite.
Looks like someone didn't read the rest of the thread. Addtionally, Dark Souls was not made by one person.
Heh. Extarbags' list is amusing to me, because the highest things on my personal list would probably be: * remove upgrading * remove character levels because they just get in the way of the stuff I like about the game. But then maybe I'm just a weirdo.
Can you elaborate on this? I think that the upgrade system in particular is superlative, but I'd be really interested to see what problems you see as resulting from upgrades/leveling, and how you'd handle character advancement otherwise.
Yeah the upgrade system is masterful, it allows for so many potential choices and directions. It would be a huge disservice to the game if suddenly you didn't have to level and could just use anything you picked up.
This list pretty much matches mine with maybe the exception of the second point. I know that playing with your friends is awesome but I'd worry it would slightly fragment the already somewhat sparse community as people might only play with their friends. Which would be a shame. Of course I say that as someone who has never tried to play with friends and only very occasionally utilizes summoning, so I might not have the best perspective on things. Mostly I hope the improve the netcode. I really suspect that the primary reason most covenants feel a little broken is that they were hoping to have a lot more people on one server and ending up running into technical limitations which caused them to scale things back to the point where certain aspects just don't work. Miracle synergies and the ridiculously high numbers to upgrade messages seem to point to that as well. Hopefully they're able to improve upon those aspects. I'm actually somewhat impressed by pyromancy, I felt like they did a good job of differentiating it from sorcery when it would have been really easy for it to feel like sorcery but orange. Same for faith really as well (other than the lightning bolt spells perhaps). World tendency, yeah, maybe if it was cyclical or event driven as you said. It only worked in Demon Souls when you didn't understand it. Once you saw behind that curtain it really wasn't any different than the stupid WRPG convention of getting +5 rep/karma/whatever for pushing the right button.
Totally agree, and also I think pyromancy v. sorcery is one of the best ways that the game integrates story with mechanics.
