Tuesday, April 26, 2016

Dark Souls 3 Has Some Bad Design Choices





The more I play Dark Souls 3, the less I'm reminded of DS1 and the more I'm reminded of DS2. The way the phases of the boss fights are set up doesn't make the bosses more fun, it just makes them 1 phase too long. These aren't like Bloodborne boss phases, they're an excuse to mask bad game design with difficulty. A boss that has a healing spell, multiple phases, and upon killing him he regains all his health is not "good" design, it is just lazy. Adding difficulty for the sake of being difficult is not good, but being naturally difficult is good. At times, Dark Souls 3 feels like it is taking too much from Dark Souls 2, and not enough from Dark Souls - which is still my favorite of the series.


Enemy placement is something that I also think could be better. At times it felt like no thought was Putting 10 moderately difficult enemies in one small area is not "difficult" it's just shitty, bad game design. Making progression annoying is bad. If you put 10 moderately difficult enemies in an area, but spread out to a point where you're not having trouble with more than a few at a time, it is still difficult, but it is not shitty. Now granted, these are very isolated incidents, but they do exist nonetheless, and when they do happen, it seems to be especially bad, if only because the rest of the game world feels so expertly crafted. Come on From Software, I thought you learned this from the failure that is Scholar of the First Sin.

Dark Souls 3 is still the Dark Souls 2 we all wanted. It delivers well on the gameplay and the throwbacks to the other two games are also very well done. The areas are intricate, though it doesn't have the same cohesiveness that Dark Souls had, and it sometimes feels like areas are blatantly designed to trick you, but I guess that is just how Souls goes. One area, in particular, is probably my favorite of any Souls game because of how you get to the boss, but otherwise, it is pretty terrible (come on with the poison floor and the giant dog-goat things).

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for sharing! I didn't notice that until I read your blog.
    imgrum

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