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Doctor Nutt posted:For me one of the big things often criticized about Dark Souls 2 (level layouts often make no sense and are even completely contradictory to physical reality) is something that just makes me love it that much more. What if Dark Souls but with Kubrick's Overlook design sensibilities? The level layouts themselves make sense, it's just that they aren't connected to each other in ways that match with their actual distances from one another in the world. I think that's cool and makes the world seem like the extant fragments of a fading memory of a place. The Dreg Heap in Dark Souls 3 explores a similar concept. I don't really buy the argument that they just ran out of time and had to lazily bang the areas together at the last minute considering the areas you visit are meant to be quite far from each other. Like, you can see Heide's Tower way in the distance from Majula and then run to it in a couple of minutes. Unless you think the devs had like an entire extra world worth of material planned to connect these areas to each other in a realistically contiguous way, they clearly always intended to use an abbreviated and abstract sense of geography.
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May 10, 2021 04:39
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GreatGreen posted:I don't think I'll ever forgive DS2 for its graphical bait and switch. It looked totally breathtaking in the promo material, its lighting engine in particular was incredible. But what we got was flatly-lit, repeating texture stamps... meh. They did eventually do some upgrade to DX11 but I never really checked into what that did to the game. Do you want an entire game of The Gutter? It wasn't a bait and switch, they realized the game would both be bad and run like trash so they dropped it. Orv fucked around with this message at 04:43 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 04:40
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Does anyone have any insight/opinions on Hood: Outlaws and Legends?
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May 10, 2021 04:41
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Volte posted:The level layouts themselves make sense, it's just that they aren't connected to each other in ways that match with their actual distances from one another in the world. I think that's cool and makes the world seem like the extant fragments of a fading memory of a place. The Dreg Heap in Dark Souls 3 explores a similar concept. I don't really buy the argument that they just ran out of time and had to lazily bang the areas together at the last minute considering the areas you visit are meant to be quite far from each other. Like, you can see Heide's Tower way in the distance from Majula and then run to it in a couple of minutes. Unless you think the devs had like an entire extra world worth of material planned to connect these areas to each other in a realistically contiguous way, they clearly always intended to use an abbreviated and abstract sense of geography. I probably worded that more strongly than I intended but I was thinking of things like (area spoilers) the way you take the elevator up to the Iron Keep.
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May 10, 2021 04:42
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Orv posted:Do you want an entire game of No Man's Wharf and Shrine of Amana? Yeah this is funny because Shrine of Amana is probably my favorite location of the game purely on aesthetics, but hoo boy it's not a very fun section of the game to play.
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May 10, 2021 04:43
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Doctor Nutt posted:Yeah this is funny because Shrine of Amana is probably my favorite location of the game purely on aesthetics, but hoo boy it's not a very fun section of the game to play. I was actually thinking of the Gutter, though both Amana and Wharf have elements of the same thing. It's very clear from unused braziers and various other potential sources of fire/torches scattered throughout the finished game that they intended to have the gameplay elements of the Gutter extend through large portions of the game itself. I can't think of a game I'd less like to play, than that version of Dark Souls 2.
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May 10, 2021 04:45
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Doctor Nutt posted:I probably worded that more strongly than I intended but I was thinking of things like (area spoilers) the way you take the elevator up to the Iron Keep. 
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May 10, 2021 04:54
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Orv posted:Do you want an entire game of No Man's Wharf and Shrine of Amana? I would have liked an option in the graphics menu of the PC version to turn it off if it made the game perform poorly. I disagree that it would have messed up gameplay because, you know, "brightness" and "contrast" settings exist. It's obvious that the only reason for the change was poor console performance necessitating it. GreatGreen fucked around with this message at 05:31 on May 10, 2021 |
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May 10, 2021 04:55
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So I got Star Ocean 4 on sale at some point, and have been sitting on it until I felt both bored and in the mood to play a PS3-era JRPG. I sat down and got through the first few hours, the weird anime crap was kinda offputting but it was successfully counterbalanced by the combat system being neat and the environments looking pretty fun. At probably 3-4 hours in I was at "I might not finish this, but I'll probably play it for a while just because it plays well and looks nice." Then I got the little kid party member, and I have maybe never done an about-face on a game so hard and fast. I'm sure the stuff I liked continues to be good, but I absolutely refuse to play a game in which that horrible creature exists for more than 30 seconds.
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May 10, 2021 05:00
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nordichammer posted:Does anyone have any insight/opinions on Hood: Outlaws and Legends? It's the height of mediocrity, which had a lot of potential but is ultimately just kinda a boring repetitive mess with the most "ok" combat and generic stealth.
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May 10, 2021 05:07
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man that is disappointing to hear. ty.
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May 10, 2021 05:22
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It doesn't seem like anyone actually wants to play it like a stealth game since the basic enemies are so weak, so against anything other than a new team it feels more like a team deathmatch with adds than a stealth race
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May 10, 2021 05:28
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GreatGreen posted:I would have liked an option in the graphics menu of the PC version to turn it off if it made the game perform poorly. loving, what.
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May 10, 2021 05:52
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Omi no Kami posted:Star Ocean 4 Oh my god what no. Do not do this. You owe it to yourself to not do this. I am so glad you have stopped doing this. Never do this again. None of the Star Ocean games are great - they mostly hover somewhere around 'reasonably neat gameplay ideas with stupid plots' - but 4 is a disaster trash fire. When 5 came out Squeenix actually came right out and promised people that they had learned their lesson from 4. (They had, sort of. 5 is slightly better. Slightly.) Should anyone care about this benighted series: 2 is probably the best and it's still not just great. 1 is basically a proof of concept with no depth, 3 suffers from really dumb gameplay decisions and one of the stupidest plot twists I have ever, ever seen, and 5 is the blandest possible porridge populated by characters who struggle to achieve one-dimensionality. Pretty, though. I have played them all. I liked most of them despite their flaws. Except 4.
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May 10, 2021 05:59
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Picayune posted:Oh my god what no. Do not do this. You owe it to yourself to not do this. I am so glad you have stopped doing this. Never do this again. Yeaaaah, funnily enough I kinda knew what I was getting into from the getgo- I love JRPGs so I looked up star ocean a while back and the consensus was, yeah, "These are kinda okay but nothing to write home about." I nabbed 4 mostly because it was on deep, deep discount, and partially because I had heard weird poo poo about it and thought I could see what the fuss about the franchise was and also giggle at weird bullshit at the same time. Except yeah, as you say- holy poo poo. For anyone who hasn't encountered the blight upon humanity that is 4, please enjoy the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNauq6_9iP0 Urban legend says that if you listen carefully, you can hear the scratches of the voice actors desperately trying to get out of the booth and run away from this job.
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May 10, 2021 06:10
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Picayune posted:Should anyone care about this benighted series: 2 is probably the best and it's still not just great. I still have a soft spot for Star Ocean 2 just because it was a sci-fi RPG that came out when I was a teenager and looking for something to fill the void Phantasy Star left behind. It didn't quite measure up, of course, and its sci-fi trappings quickly became limited to an overlong Prime Directive episode of Star Trek, but it worked okay and had a few strong characters and was long enough to kill a summer, which I guess was all I really needed in 1999. There's a new-ish version of Star Ocean 1 on the Switch I've been curious about, if only because it resembles SO2. If nothing else there was a style there which is neat to see again and was naturally totally lost in SO3 onwards.
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May 10, 2021 06:26
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Doctor Nutt posted:Yeah this is funny because Shrine of Amana is probably my favorite location of the game purely on aesthetics, but hoo boy it's not a very fun section of the game to play. The first half of this sentence ignited some rage, and the second half made me  so much of DS2 is like that: amazing to look at or tonally great, but loving miserable to actually play. Then there's the remainder which is miserable to look at and to play (or boring and empty)Also the movement is poo poo and the animations are terrible. I still like it though 
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May 10, 2021 06:30
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majula theme best theme, ds2 wins
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May 10, 2021 07:01
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Volte posted:Unless you think the devs had like an entire extra world worth of material planned to connect these areas to each other in a realistically contiguous way, they clearly always intended to use an abbreviated and abstract sense of geography. Honesty even the base game without DLC borders on being too long for me so I can't really imaginae what that would look like. Say what you will about Dark Souls 2 having a rough development cycle, but it's certainly not lacking in length or content. To chime in with everyone else, I'm really fond of the game even if it's probably the hardest for me to play in the trilogy. Dark Souls 1 and 3 are total comfort gaming for me that I could easily roll through a million times; every time I play DS2 though there's a new moment like "wow I totally forgot they put this weird poo poo in the game" -- still though, I come away from it with respect for the team's ambition and their willingness to evolve on tropes established in Dark Souls in some unexpected ways. It gets a little muddled somewhere in there and my list of "forgettable bosses" in DS2 probably has more entries than 1 and 3 combined, but I'm kind of glad there's a weirdo stepchild in the series and if you're playing through the trilogy fresh I imagine it sets things up nicely for DS3 being more of a return to form. edit: and just about anyone will tell you they knocked it out of the park with the DLC. It adds a ton of content to an already dense game, but it's absolutely worth going through, and has some really creative level and enemy design
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May 10, 2021 07:18
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Orv posted:Do you want an entire game of The Gutter? the prerelease lighting shown was too high contrast but with some small adjustments would have been an order of magnitude better than what we actually got, which looked insanely worse. absolutely fair to call it a bait and switch.
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May 10, 2021 07:27
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A lot of things about Dark Souls 2 is among my favorite in the series, but there's one thing that really, really drags it down, and it's that the enemy placements were done by the actual Satan. Easy encounters are still unfun slogs of either multiple large unflinching enemies or a clown car of smaller mooks that can come from what it feels like anywhere in the stage once you run across a hidden tripwire. And the hard encounters encroach some of the most awful unfair bullshit a Souls game ever throws at you with endless barrages of ranged magic while you struggle to run across difficult terrain to try and kill just one source of pain and suffering... and often wind up hitting at least one of those previously mentioned hidden tripwires in the process.
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May 10, 2021 07:28
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Mr. Locke posted:And the hard encounters encroach some of the most awful unfair bullshit a Souls game ever throws at you with endless barrages of ranged magic while you struggle to run across difficult terrain to try and kill just one source of pain and suffering... and often wind up hitting at least one of those previously mentioned hidden tripwires in the process.
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May 10, 2021 07:40
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Dark Souls 2 is poo poo because they ruined the lightning throwing ability.
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May 10, 2021 07:46
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Pwnstar posted:Dark Souls 2 is poo poo because they ruined the lightning throwing ability. All I can think of when reading this is 
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May 10, 2021 07:49
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Pwnstar posted:Dark Souls 2 is poo poo because they ruined the lightning throwing ability. Did they make it weaker? I remember using it at launch and just rolling over every area and boss except for the huge dead king
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May 10, 2021 08:16
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Omi no Kami posted:Except yeah, as you say- holy poo poo. For anyone who hasn't encountered the blight upon humanity that is 4, please enjoy the following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNauq6_9iP0  And here I thought seeing Kainé in Nier 1 would be the most embarrassed I'd feel this week regarding a video game.
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May 10, 2021 08:19
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Flavahbeast posted:Did they make it weaker? I remember using it at launch and just rolling over every area and boss except for the huge dead king It was basically really good for everything so they compromised by making it useless for everything.
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May 10, 2021 08:31
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OzFactor posted:this sense of bewildering atemporality and non-euclidian space I got some of this in Dark Souls III, and was pretty impressed by the avant-garde and challenging level design, and after about 15 minutes I realized that area's walls and floors just weren't rendering.
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May 10, 2021 08:47
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Flavahbeast posted:Did they make it weaker? I remember using it at launch and just rolling over every area and boss except for the huge dead king They massively nerfed the damage and then massively nerfed the amount of charges you get in the same patch for all offensive miracles and never got around to fixing it.
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May 10, 2021 08:47
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All this talk of Souls just really makes me want Elden Ring even more.
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May 10, 2021 09:07
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Pwnstar posted:It was basically really good for everything so they compromised by making it useless for everything. I recently wrapped up a DS2 faith lightning run and this person is not lying. While having infinite healing is pretty cool, look forward to assaulting every boss with puppy kisses, Greater Puppy Kisses and Sunlight Puppy Kisses. Buffing your sword with Puppy Kisses. Then after you get to like 60 FTH, you roll into the DLC and your sad, flaccid Puppy Kisses damage gets downgraded to Kitten Kisses. Just desperately wailing on the drat Ice Cat with Heide's Feather Duster while constantly winded because your extreme investment in faith means your character can't walk to the fridge without having to stop for a break on the way. I might be a little bitter.
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May 10, 2021 09:32
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Personally I'm also salty about them loving up pyromancy by making it scale off of stats instead of just the flame implement. You know, the innate power of all humanity that everyone is supposed to be innately able to use...now has stat requirements. Making it functionally identical to dark magic. Or ruining backstabs because of the dumb PvP. Dark Souls 2 really is 2 steps back for every step forward. I'm really curious to read what someone just off their first DS1 run will think about it, especially the Kaizo-Dark Souls that is Scholar of the First Sin. At least they won't have to deal with durability going down twice as fast on PC because it's tied to framerate anymore (only took them a remaster and then another year of patching to fix).
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May 10, 2021 09:44
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Playsing DS2 from release was great because I got to experience everything: the overpowered miracles, binoc-boosting, and the game even had BLJs! (They weren't backwards or long, but you get what I mean)
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May 10, 2021 12:39
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i've always condensed my ds2 criticisms down to: someone wrote up a list of perceived abused mechanics in 1 based off of what the community used. a team of designers individually proposed solutions to every problem. all solutions were implemented with no overall design ethos. each choice taken in a vacuum could have been fine, but it's mostly fighting against how most of the playerbase played ds1
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May 10, 2021 13:12
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Glare Seethe posted:the sound design, the sparse music One of my favorite, most subtle of things in Dark Souls are the sounds of your jangling gear and your deliberate footsteps. Backed by the low howl of some wind or the crackle of a burning touch and the occasional growl of some monster or jerky man waiting to ambush me around the corner it just hits a fuckin' vibe. Glare Seethe posted:Quick shoutout to the worst boss: Ceaseless Discharge. Still no idea how to dodge this thing. I beat it like this: tank an attack -> get 2-3 hits in -> heal -> repeat. I had enough damage and estus flasks for that to work. When I fought him legit he just spammed his overhead spider arm slams over and over like he was Metal Gear Excelsus and I just dodged those over and over and whittled him down. Dunno if I kept at exactly the right range to make him not breath fire or what. Glare Seethe posted:For instance, the last time I saw Siegmeyer was in Blighttown, when I went back (on this thread's tip) to check out The Great Hollow and Ash Lake. I would've missed those areas had I not been pointed towards them (I'll cop to doing a very poor job exploring the bottom of Blighttown), and by the time Siegmeyer went there my business in that area was long concluded. Yeah his quest is really bad about it because of that Blighttown step being out of sequence to anything the player is doing. That and his daughter showing up at Firelink looking for him. Plus even if you progress it properly he's likely to get himself killed in an awkward scripted fight in Lost Izalith before you even get to worry about tracking him down in Ash Lake. Unfortunately they never quite dialed in how to do side quests. DS2 probably does the best job of it but even there you can sometimes accidentally lose the thread for dubious reasons. DS3 is the absolute worst about it where just about every NPC will gently caress off if you don't do everything in exactly the correct order and avoid tripping the invisible triggers that make the quests derail.
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May 10, 2021 13:45
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John Murdoch posted:Unfortunately they never quite dialed in how to do side quests. DS2 probably does the best job of it but even there you can sometimes accidentally lose the thread for dubious reasons. DS3 is the absolute worst about it where just about every NPC will gently caress off if you don't do everything in exactly the correct order and avoid tripping the invisible triggers that make the quests derail. You say this like it's inadvertent, but it clearly isn't. From's entire gimmick has always been loving the player over based on lack of knowledge.
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May 10, 2021 14:17
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K8.0 posted:You say this like it's inadvertent, but it clearly isn't. From's entire gimmick has always been loving the player over based on lack of knowledge. If the goal was just to be a dick about it why reinvent the wheel every game.
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May 10, 2021 14:21
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John Murdoch posted:If the goal was just to be a dick about it why reinvent the wheel every game. I think you answered your own question
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May 10, 2021 14:32
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K8.0 posted:You say this like it's inadvertent, but it clearly isn't. From's entire gimmick has always been loving the player over based on lack of knowledge.
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May 10, 2021 14:57
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Gay Rat Wedding posted:the prerelease lighting shown was too high contrast but with some small adjustments would have been an order of magnitude better than what we actually got, which looked insanely worse. absolutely fair to call it a bait and switch. Ohhhh, I thought it was about the whole darkness thing, my bad. I'm not too bothered either way but yeah fair enough. Mr. Locke posted:A lot of things about Dark Souls 2 is among my favorite in the series, but there's one thing that really, really drags it down, and it's that the enemy placements were done by the actual Satan. Easy encounters are still unfun slogs of either multiple large unflinching enemies or a clown car of smaller mooks that can come from what it feels like anywhere in the stage once you run across a hidden tripwire. And the hard encounters encroach some of the most awful unfair bullshit a Souls game ever throws at you with endless barrages of ranged magic while you struggle to run across difficult terrain to try and kill just one source of pain and suffering... and often wind up hitting at least one of those previously mentioned hidden tripwires in the process. This remains really silly for me to see people constantly level against 2. It definitely has a couple of the worst areas in From's modern catalog - first half of Iron Keep and second half of Earthen Peak in Scholar - but literally every Souls game and Bloodborne have many sections of unannounced group combat and really lovely ambush placements. It's their entire thing, check every corner or get smacked and just occasionally gently caress you anyhow.
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May 10, 2021 15:25
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