Game News
Dark Souls
The launch of Dark Souls II has been overwhelmingly positive for From Software and Namco Bandai. The game has received staggeringly positive critical reception and the community has embraced it with open arms – for the most part.
Fans of the series have been starting petitions to get some of the more controversial aspects of the game fixed.
The first petition asks Namco Bandai to fix Soul Memory. For those who are unaware, Soul Memory is an aspect of the game designed to better pair you up with people of your skill level. The problem is that it’s so stingy that it’s now making invasions and cooperative play sparse and overly difficult, effectively sabotaging the community they wanted to pull in with Dark Souls II‘s new accessibility.
Finite respawning, also in the petition, is a new system in place to help people who are stuck at a certain area progress. In the original Dark Souls, you would have to kill the enemies to progress, but if you died, you’d start over and have to kill them all again. This repetition was frowned upon by many, but embraced by monster farmers. The problem is now that farmers have more trouble gathering precious loot, and some argue that it’s making the game too easy.
The second petition asks Namco Bandai to fix the timed cooperation. In Dark Souls, when you summoned a player into your world, they could help you progress through the level or take on a boss. This was not a timed endeavour and, as long as you both lived, could continue playing together. In DS II, there is a time limit to how long summons last, making exploration a thing of the past while engaging in jolly cooperation.
I have sunk over fifty hours into Dark Souls II thus far, and I tend to agree that these aspects need to be fixed.
vGamerz Thanks to all our Contributors; Independent Writers, Journalists and Guest Bloggers for helping the site to became better with good an engaging content and for keeping our readers up to date with the most recent updates about all types of online games.
11 Comments
Zakku Redwolf
Wow .. yeah .. I can totally agree with these. I miss having monsters respawn every time … and having friends indefinitely … hopefully it is fixed by the time the pc version arrives!
Airisu
I thought I would see a petition about stunlocking in pvp. That should really be up there. Someone with like 140 poise shouldnt be stunned in 2 hits by a kanana.
Lloyde Gildner
I agree to a point. Stagger after a couple of hits? That is ridiculous. now if you were to be slowed to prevent poise stabs then this would not stop someone with huge armor from delivering a counter attack. The poise could defiantly use some work.
Simon O'Neill
I agree Airisu. There seems to be quite a few things they need to address. Hitboxes as well are giving everybody a rough time.
Collectorknight
Good that true ,,Souls” players started that petition.
Dark souls 2 is not Dark Souls, is Casual Souls now. Only deletingsoul memory and adding infinite enemies, the challenge will finally come back(with some possible help).
TDM
“It’s Casual Souls now!!!!!”
I can’t stop laughing at this. Making it more difficult to farm for souls (aka gain more power) and items (to become more powerful) — and you can still farm, you just need to make the area more powerful to do so — and soul memory pairing together people who’ve spent (resulting in would-be low-soul-level gankers getting paired with people of really high soul level, and making it difficult to summon friends to camp and gank — yes, this makes things CASUAL, by removing your Lazy Ganker Easy Mode.
Niiiice.
lordtheshred
Both those stupid new mechanics are band-aids. Want people to stop farming? Then make the enemies stop dropping any souls after a certain number of kills. Or, if you’re for some reason hell-bent on having finite respawns, make a merchant who begins selling the gear drops from the enemies once they’ve all been depleted. Making a finite respawn mechanic is just retarded. What if the enemy you’re farming drops an item that’s crucial to your build? Sure, you can just burn an ascetic (thus jacking your game up to NG+), but who the hell wants to do that? That’s not actual difficulty, that’s fake and imbalanced crap. As for soul memory, what the hell is so hard about just giving gear a Soul Level requirement? Nothing, but apparently From (and people like you) can’t grasp that concept.
kVina Embraced
There are so many more important (though perhaps some minor) things to complain about (Soul Memory, hit-boxes, frame rate, gear/magic balancing, downgraded lighting making torches near useless…) that I feel should take priority over enemy respawns and timed summons.
Now it seems that when an item is claimed to be “rare” … it actually is; not just flavor text. Didn’t get some enemy loot? Burn an Ascetic or move onto NG+ (“Spoiler”: Ascetics respawn nearly all items too- except metal chests I’ve heard). Need souls? Go Co-Op, or invade. Need to turn Human? Co-Op or beat your own bosses (I’ve HEARD it DOES still restore Humanity- only less often the more you defeat the same bosses; maybe not on first try, but third).
So far I believe I’ve only been sent home early from the Large Soapstone maybe twice: it sucks, but just go summon another phantom. I’m glad Hosts can’t form hunting parties of white phantoms and just wait around to gang-up on invaders; and with time shortening for each kill phantoms make it forces the host to put in some effort.
These changes don’t exactly make things easier, but they seem to have been made with good intentions to balance mechanics and encourage jolly Co-Op; and there are still ways of dealing with it. In fact, I believe that’s the point: and they’re probably still scaling numbers and tailoring mechanics. Common guys, this IS a Soul’s game,
Ronie
I’ve played Demon’s souls and Dark souls, loved both. But I’ll only play this game if the Respawn Limit is removed. Its a sin in a game like this, make me feel its a linear gamer rather than a rpg. There are many different forms to make a game hard, but enemy limit is an insult for me. Enemy respawn limit is a mark of the laziness of the developers trying to make the game harder in the most simply and stupid way. Soul’s series are over for me.
lordtheshred
This game, unfortunately, is a mess, and it sucks. It shouldn’t suck, but it does. Where do I even begin? Finite respawns are a stupid idea for obvious reasons, as is the soul memory. It can effectively make a lower-level character worthless. One of my favorite activities in Dark Souls was to run a certain boss on co-op over and over; there’s something fun about helping people bring down a tough enemy. But in Dark Souls II you can’t do that because of soul memory. The hitboxes are ungodly (I’m looking at you, Lost Sinner). It seems like they programmed the hitboxes into the larger enemies and then just scaled them down for smaller ones without making any changes, thus giving relatively normal-sized weapons seemingly infinite range. The lag in PvP makes online unplayable sometimes; I’ve had people running in midair above my head, magic come flying out of nothingness to my left while my opponent was teleporting around in front of my face, and watched someone perform a backstab animation from across the room while my health dropped for no reason. Poison is incredibly OP; it’s Toxic from Dark Souls, and Toxic in DS2 shouldn’t even be in the game. I’m glad they made Curse not such bull, but they completely nullified that by adding Petrify, which is the exact same thing as Curse from DS1. Bleed reducing stamina as well as health seems pretty retarded; although it’s never caused me any major problems, it just seems tacked-on and pointless. The stun-locking gets old fast, especially when my poise is over 100 and I get stun-locked by some scrub flailing a starting-gear dagger. As for NG+, I heard originally that it was going to give many enemies entirely new move sets and replace their locations, thus giving you an actual new experience. From what I’ve seen, there are a crap ton of NPC red phantoms that have infinite health and do infinite damage no matter what their build, not one enemy has changed places, and nothing has any new move sets. It’s inflated numbers all over again; more artificial difficulty, the thing that From is best at. Overall this game is incredibly flawed and a real piece of crap, and it shouldn’t be. It should be amazing, but instead it’s at best mediocre. Nice job, From, you’ve failed again. I’m not sure why I’m surprised anymore.
Steed
Waah waah waa-waah? Waah waah! :) Apparently I want From to “break” all my games from here on out, then, because I’d gladly see Skyrim/Elder Scrolls wiped off the planet in favor for Demons/Dark/Dark2.. All I hear is a lot of “Its not like Dark Souls 1!”, well, go play Dark Souls 1 then :> As far as enemies not respawning you just clean a whole area completely and then use aesthetic to restore enemies and ramp difficulty.. Granted, I would like to see a lesser aesthetic item you can buy cheaply that would restore enemies only (no items, no difficulty increase).. Not sure how bleed reducing both stamina and hp could seem “tacked on” without everything seeming “tacked on” :| Additionally, the “scrub flailing a starting-gear dagger” could have went to extreme measures (including rings) to be a poise-buster, and it seems like it worked since he tazed you bad enough to give you bad memories :P Believe me, running around with a noob dagger doesn’t cut it, or break poise on a player or creature that has appropriate defense for it. Also, potentially some of the online connectivity woes you’ve suffered probably have to do with server load, or trying to connect to or summon someone like me, who has an internet connection that barely works.. I have entire nights where I can’t summon or be summoned due to my net cap.
Anyway, for now, grinding an area to get stronger (besides just repeatedly helping people online with bosses, which I’ve never had trouble finding people for) requires using the aesthetics, so try to hang out around the first couple areas and get as strong as possible by using a couple per bonfire and you’ll see how brutal the game can get :P As it stands part of the soul memory issue is probably due to people rapidly farming bosses til they get insanely strong.. I’ve farmed them, but not excessively (I’m up to Iron Keep at SL 113 or so and still find team-mates when my net allows it)..
I dunno.. This isn’t really something they can just “fix” real quick because they built the whole game around some of these mechanics.. I personally don’t agree with the enemies disappearing after a set amount of kills, but this does force you to move on or use an aesthetic, which is another version of moving on.