Dark Souls

The remake of Shadow of the Colossus, by the same studio, got similar complaints. At the very least, it shows how we've come a long way from the brown and bloom of that era.

Edited by Eschaton on Jun 11th 2020 at 9:46:04 AM

Oh god they did do the Colossus remake didn't they

God I hated that

I mean, I wouldn't have expected the game to look exactly the same anyway. It seems like the main difference is there's not nearly as much bloom, which is funny because the Nier replicant remake made that same change.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Jun 11th 2020 at 2:31:07 PM

I much preferred the Colossus remake. IIRC they made some mechanical changes to Colossus as well to make stamina regen not such a bitch, so I wonder if they'll make any changes to how fucking broken DeS is, or maybe even just making the tendency system not so damn obfuscating.

I didn't have any problems with the Colossus remake either. Been too long since I played the original to make any proper comparisons, but there were definitely some quality of life improvements.

As for Demon's Souls, they'd be mad not to address its flaws, especially since probably all of them have solutions in the later Soulsborne games. They could limit the amount of healing items you can carry, for example.

Yeah, I wanted to ask — how well does Demon's Souls hold up nowadays?

It's simultaneously janky and limited in scope while being the easiest game in the series to crack open. There's no way to play Demon's Souls and not end it as an overpowered god.

The base gameplay, combat, and level design is fundamentally solid and it has a great atmosphere, but mechanically it has a lot of problems.

To begin with, item burden sucks. You don't have an infinite inventory space like in the following games which means you're forced to do inventory management and you might be caught in a situation where you'll have to drop something else to pick up important drops like armor and so on.

Rolling is completely binary. It's either fast or fat roll depending on whether you're above or below 50%, and it mean armor is mostly suboptimal since there's no poise mechanic either, meaning you can get stunlocked (in fairness, it feels more thoughtfully designed around this than say, Dark Souls 3).

You're basically funnelled into wearing 2 specific rings the whole time, the Cling Ring and the Thief's Ring, because when you die and go into soul form you're at half HP and the Cling Ring puts you at 75%, and thief's ring lets you sneak around and deal with enemies more easily.

The reason you want to stay in soul form is because the World Tendency system makes no sense. When you die in human form too many times in a level the enemies all get tougher and you lose maximum HP in soul form, so it punishes newer players really hard if they want the extra HP to help out, while more experienced players have an easier time because they won't die. It was easier to manipulate this back when the servers were online since either invading or killing an invader messed with the world tendency, but that doesn't work anymore. There are certain events that only happen in pure black or pure white tendency, so it means that depending on how you play there's content you'll pretty much never see unless you play in a very specific way (in that sense i guess it's not much different from the other games).

The upgrade system sucks. It's too needlessly convoluted with the upgrade paths and requires way too many materials to upgrade. You might as well just get the crescent falchion and then hang onto that until beating flamelurker so you can make boss weapons which don't need to be upgraded.

I'm looking forward to what Bluepoint does with the mechanics of the game. If I'm not mistaken they've been working on this since the remake for Colossus came out in 2018, when they announced that they were working on a another remake that was more ambitious than Colossus.

I'd forgotten or not realised most of that. Really, if they lifted mechanics almost directly from Dark Souls III and just dumped them in the world of Demon's Souls, you'd probably be like 80% there.

(I realise it's almost certainly not that straightforward).

I really hope they do give it a serious overhaul though.

TBH I'm not sure how to best tweak the world tendency system specifically. My first thought is just to streamline it or scrap it entirely, so that the tendency events are dependent on you being in soul form or human or other specific story/progression triggers.

The rest they can mostly just take from the sequels as is, like removing item burden, buffing heavy armor and introducing different tiers of rolling, streamlining the upgrade system, and so on.

I don't know if they have the source code for og demon's souls (companies don't do the best job of keeping those around even recently), but in any case if this is supposed to be a much more ambitious remake than even Sot C there's no way they won't make changes to the gameplay I think.

Demon's Souls is still one of the best games on PS 3, and I'd even say it's still better than Dark Souls II. It's just got a ton of Early-Installment Weirdness to it these days.

Yes, I agree. Despite the flaws it really is a great game, and it still arguably does some things better than the sequels like the atmosphere and gimmick fights.

I like how it looks a lot more than the Dark Souls trilogy, I imagine because the segmented levels meant they didn't have to think about how they all existed in a cohesive world.

Iron Pineapple made a good point about the boss fights in his recent reaction video regarding the remake. In the sequels, a lot of the boss fights are reduced to “roll, roll, stab, stab” ad nauseam. In Demon’s Souls, there are far more bosses that are almost like a puzzle where you need to discover their weakness in order to be able to properly damage them, much like bosses from the Legend of Zelda series.

Conversely Demon's Souls had some awful gimmick bosses like Dragon God and Storm Ruler.

Tower Knight is, as far as I'm concerned, From's only good puzzle boss in all of their games. Then they made it again but super gross in Bloodborne.

Storm Ruler is an awful boss since when?

The Old Hero was a good gimmick boss too.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Jun 12th 2020 at 4:47:48 AM

I actually consider the Adjudicator a gimmick boss that had good potential but was damaged by a botched execution.

I don't remember Ajudicator being that bad outside of maybe the camera.

I forgot Old Hero was a puzzle boss since I always wore that ring that hides your sound, so he just kind of waddles around the arena getting stabbed.

4-2 was a nightmare, yo.

Those black weeb skeletons still scare the fuck out of me.

PTSD flashbacks to farming that fucking Black Skeleton for Pure Bladestone.

And with the remake the dupe glitch is almost certainly gone so no having 99 of it to share around once you've got one either.

Oh man, I just remembered that in this game the gem lizards only respawn a certain number of times, whether you actually manage to kill them or not. Miss them, and that's whatever their drop is gone forever. And you have to pick up the loot from their bodies, rather than it just appearing in your inventory like in Dark Souls. I forget if it ever happened to me, but I saw a youtuber playing the game once, and they accidentally kicked the body off a cliff without getting the loot, so that was lost forever too.

Somehow I'd never compared Demon's Souls directly to a specific Dark Souls game, and I think you're right, I'd also prefer to play Demon's Souls than Dark Souls II, though I don't think I'd go as far as saying it's objectively better.

As for whoever mentioned the level design, yeah, as cool and intricate as Dark Souls' open worlds are, they lack a certain authenticity that Demon's Souls has. Each area has a logical progression to it, and a consistency of feel, which the first Dark Souls in particular lacks. Demon's Souls areas feel more like real places.

I think if you miss the lizards, you can just quit and reload and they'll be there?