From Software 'n such

[Lemnear]

Spoiler

Dark Souls 2 most definitely feels more "King's Field" to me than any other FromSoft game since Demon's Souls.
In fact, I'm one of many people who bounced off the game when it first came out, but returning to it after having played all of the King's Field and adjacent games, I appreciated it much, much more.
I don't think it was ever intended to be a King's Field game though, and I don't think any ideas that made it into it were leftover King's Field things either. The development process is well documented, and I've heard nothing of the sorts. But the King's Field games are all very much Naotoshi Zin games (the founder you were talking about), so it's probably not unreasonable to assume that his involvement in the game (the only credited one I think in the entire series?) is probably what made it feel more "kf like".

Yeah, that's the impression, but DeS is also very King's Field...that "survival/puzzle" feel.
I think the total, unrestricted freedom in building is a flaw in something "King's Field"-esque (I'm looking at you, Elden Ring).
It lacks that sense of knowing/searching what the right choice is to progress smoothly, which is a very RPG component, unlike all the open worlds these days that simply tell you to run around and kill all the bosses however the fuck you want.
People, however, see this as a kind of flaw: "Oh no, I can't do whatever I want in a super hostile dark fantasy kingdom? Ugh." In short, it adds that sense of survival that's increasingly being lost, and I'm not talking about direct difficulty that requires some particular skill, but rather adopting a specific approach to various situations and never wasting available resources.

The thing about DeS is that it doesn't really force you play one particular way though. There are *many* right answers to the question of how to progress. Yes, there are some levels where it's more profitable to grind or farm for resources than other levels. Depending what you are looking for. But there are at least 4-5 different weapons you can pick up for free across the game which start at a base level of at least +1. The Crescent Falchion+1 gets all the attention of course, because of the OP recharging effect and being several tiers higher than a default +1, and dealing magic damage too, but that doesn't make it the only viable option. The fire longsword and holy mace are as good in their own ways for specific builds, and depending on your build, it might even be that a humble halberd could be the most optimal weapon for you. And so the "right" way to play the game is very different depending on your build.

I'm not a huge fan of elden ring but I don't see how ER is really any different. DeS is one of the easiest of the souls games, and so if anything the freedom to build your character as you like is even more pronounced. Because a suboptimal decision won't be punished. If you can move your character around, roll a little bit, block with a shield etc, then it really doesn't matter what your build is in DeS. You can make it work. Sure, skeletons take more damage from maces and holy or magic weapons and they take less from blades but all of the builds are going to have answers to problems like this.

Also the "never wasting valuable resources" line is a bit silly, because grass stacks to 99 in DeS and there are like six different kinds of healing grasses. A very common sight in PvP/getting invaded by some dick was stabbing a guy over and over while he stuffed more spinach into his face than Popeye the Sailor Man and refused to go down. If you mash the square button then even bosses can't usually kill you, because the time-to-eat is so fast and the stacks are massive. It's the exact design flaw that Estus was created to fix. I do kinda prefer the jank infinite healing of DeS (and DS2) because of some weird ways it changes the balance, but I couldn't argue against someone who wanted to say that DS1 and ER have a better healing system than DeS and DS2. Also, the blood vials of bloodborne are kinda annoying too, since you periodically have to farm them. It's trivially easy but still unnecessary for a resource that could have been like estus flasks and probably should have been. Having a finite amount of these is pointless because there's no scarcity of them. If you don't have 100 or so next time you arrive at a boss zone, you're going to go farm estus until you have enough and then come back. I don't think anybody except the challenge run youtubers are taking on bosses like Logarius with 7 blood vials, because "that's how many I have and I refuse to grind for more."

TL;DR Demon's Souls is an easy game and so I don't understand what you mean about it pushing a right way to play. Yes, I know everyone always says "souls games are easy" but DeS gives you multiple 99 stackable healing grasses that cast nearly instantly and it's widely acknowledged one of the easier Souls games to exist. Especially if you're just trying to clear and not stressing over getting perfect world tendency or seeing all the quest resolutions/meeting all npcs you can in a single run.

Well, yes, it's the easiest, but just like the Souls trilogy and Bloodborne, the gameplay changes completely based on the character you play. While in Elden Ring, I feel like the only thing that matters is maximizing damage, and this undermines some choices. You can do whatever builds you want, but some are obviously less functional... it's not a question of "solving" a dungeon, because it all comes down to beating up the enemies harder and that's it.
Not to mention that enemies scale beyond your level... I've got about 200 hours in and I'm almost at LV200, and the enemies still deal incredible blows. This really breaks down my progression, and it constantly feels like you're always at LV1. Not to mention that the enemies have Bloodborne-like movesets, but you move like in any Souls game.
I don't know, for me it's the worst they've ever made and all the praise it received will only damage the "soul of Souls",

[Blinge]

DS2 - Beat alonne and fume knight with my fatass build, no rolling at all. Greatshield and strafing baby!

also ryu god damnit i'm looking back over my stream and it was super stuttery during the ivory king segment! like.. an absolute embarassment, i want to tear my hair out looking at it.
why did no one tell me at the time, were you still there?

[ryu]

also ryu god damnit i'm looking back over my stream and it was super stuttery during the ivory king segment! like.. an absolute embarassment, i want to tear my hair out looking at it.
why did no one tell me at the time, were you still there?

Hm, Youtube has been running like shit for me since quitting my premium membership a while back, so I don't think much of it when streams momentarily crap out for me. Beyond that I didn't notice much. Looking back at some snippets from your stream there seem to be a few micro stutters here and there, but they're so minor that I can't be confident I'm not imagining them.

[Blinge]

Haha its alright bud, it looks like it was only for about 10 minutes or so.
panic over

[Blinge]

...

I feel like the answer in Elden Ring is to use the massive toybox of stuff you can find to give you an edge.
Are you a purist or is using Summon Ash on the table for you?

[Lemnear]

...

I feel like the answer in Elden Ring is to use the massive toybox of stuff you can find to give you an edge.
Are you a purist or is using Summon Ash on the table for you?

I'll try again today, I hope. The summons aren't working well for me; some are unique compared to others, and I like them (like Stormhawk Deenh).
It bothers me that, unlike other Souls games, if I choose a "suboptimal" weapon, the game becomes a gimmick and it feels like I've added extra difficulty. I'd prefer it to be a little more balanced and less restrictive in my choices. The closer you get to the End Game, the more "obligatory" it is to optimize your character (with the most popular weapons, obviously), otherwise every fight, even the most stupid, becomes tedious and incredibly long.

[Austin]

Using your weapon specials, defensive/shield specials, along with Ashes of War, is crucial in Elden Ring, IMO. If you're playing it like a classic Souls game, you're doing yourself a disservice and making it a lot more difficult (and probably a lot less fun) on yourself.

(Saying this as someone that's gone through the game like, ten times by now.)

[Blinge]

I'd have to say i agree with that.

Also Some weapons have always massively outclassed others in the Souls series.
I did a lot of lategame Beldo Rim with the pizza cutter lol.

[ryu]

So today I learned you can only have 4 active character profiles at one time in Demon's Souls. I wanted to start a fresh game, and now I have to delete one of my very first souls characters from over 10 years ago.

Miyazaki why are you making me do this?;_;

[Sima Tuna]

Yeah, that was the same problem in the ps3 original. In every Souls game, I inevitably max out the save file limit. At least on console. I assume the pc ports have infinite saves but I only played souls games on consoles, due to having a weak PC.

I suppose one "good" point to demon's souls is builds can be fairly broad if you want. In casual play, I usually make my DeS character able to equip most items and not super specialized. There are also a lot of items during the early and midgame that don't have any investment cost really. I guess what I'm trying to say is build "variety" feels limited in DeS compared to some of the later games. I'm sure some will disagree because you can hard commit to a play style and there are some starts that do heavily push towards a unique build type. But... It's all still fairly modular. And the game is easy enough that min-maxing was never a priority for me, compared to having access to some basic conveniences on every build that make the game more fun.

Also Some weapons have always massively outclassed others in the Souls series.

This point of Blinge's also applies to why I feel DeS builds kind of flatten out or homogenize in places. Some weapons are just better than other weapons and all builds/play styles end up at a place where they want to use certain weapons in certain parts of the game unless they are specifically roleplaying or dislike that weapon for some reason. AKA if you know a zone is weak vs fire weapons then the only reason not to use fire weapons is roleplay, and if the game gives you a fire weapon for free that doesn't require investment, well... You could make a fire weapon of a different type but the investment cost would be quite substantial for the exact same return.

[ryu]

In casual play, I usually make my DeS character able to equip most items and not super specialized.

That's how my first playthrough went. I put points into faith for healing spells, points into int for sorceries to deal with Flamelurker and also carried sword and bow with me lol. The series was always kind of about abusing whatever gives you an advantage (my character in DkS2 vanilla was also an all-rounder), which is how we arrived at Elden Ring.

[drauch]

Sup dogs. I'm finally playing King's Field IV.

To be hyperbolic, it's been a revelatory experience. I think this is my new favorite From game, despite only like 16-17 hours in. Already loved KF 1-2 and Shadow Tower, but the design in this keeps blowing me away, like how it teaches you in vague clues or by showing scenes, like that dead giant with the two arrows in his dome. My jaw dropped when I was in a pitch-black room, and despite using my magic to see in the dark, it still wouldn't illuminate the area. Little whispers and slithering sounds kept me anxious, so I started spamming my fire magic, inadvertently hitting the unseen pedestal in the middle and illuminating the daunting ceiling above. Just little stuff like that, or a room with a door that cannot be opened, covered in lit sconces. One small one on the shell is unlit, and after lighting, the door opens! Just rad, man. Really making me want to start up Ultima Underworld again and learn lizard speak to progress.

Didn't mean to make both examples about fire, but ya get the drift. Maybe I've just played too much modern stuff, but I miss not being treated like the idiot I am and figuring out cryptic messages and actually feeling an accomplishment for progressing by thinking and looking at my surroundings, rather than a difficult boss or being straight-up told where to go. Taking my time so I can soak it all up.

[Xan]

KF IV is quite decent as far as PS2 games go, but I feel it's one of those many games that peaks around those marks of 33% or 50% progression, I got to somewhere near the end and lost all motivation to keep going with it. It's something I hope to finish one day though. For me it doesn't quite hold up to the lore, atmosphere or music they had with the PS1 games, but it would have felt different on the PS2 either way, so it's not entirely surprising they dropped all of that for KF IV.

(minor spoiler alert I guess) Now I played and finished Eternal Ring recently for the first time, and that turned out to be a real disappointment for me. Storyline that winds up being total nonsense to an almost brazen extent, barely any content to the game and they even make you find the ability to run and you still have to equip it and waste a slot, which I found ridiculous after 2 KF games where you just had it. With the ring creation system I for some reason assumed for most of the game that you have to use all slots, but towards the end checked the manual and found that's not the case - just two slots at a minimum, so often it just seems like a waste to use all slots as using less could give the same magic for fewer items. Regardless, the system just boils down to trying all combinations and sitting through a slow reload everytime to get the best stuff. There were only 1 or 2 spots in the whole game where I had to experiment in order to get a decent damage spell to progress, vast majority of spells just seemed irrelevant. I did appreciate that they bothered to make a little render for every ring in the game though, with that nice CG look of the time. Perhaps as sort of an experiment they did away with the stamina bar that every KF game had, but the stamina thing arguably helped to sell the realism of getting this powerful heavy weapon that you can barely handle and Eternal Ring lacking it seemed to make the combat feel even more mundane to me.

Worse for me was probably the technical side, specifically that you can't go around certain objects that you easily could in the PS1 games, resulting in several cheap deaths, and the fact that it has loading screens when KF2JP already presented a seamless world in 1995. It's also their first 60 FPS game, but it can slow down with a couple of enemies and any slowdown causes quite an ugly judder effect, making me question the utility of 60 FPS in a very basic looking game (clearly a proto-KF4 engine with just less going on). Models look good for the time though, admittedly, easily beyond any PC game of the day. The game doesn't use the analog sticks at all, which amusingly they explicitly make clear in the options - not a big deal by itself but this is the game where I found the DS2 Dpad really sucks for prolonged use as it takes way too much pressure to register anything. They even messed with the analog function on it, but that's absolutely horrible and they probably knew as it's off by default. Finally, on my 70k Slim the game had really bizarre and severe audio issues - hard to describe but sort of like stuck random synthesizer notes, and could only be fixed by a hard reset of the console, so if it happens you have to deal with it until you find a save spot. I can't find any mention of it and I played the Japanese version, which predates the English one by 7 months, so my guess is it got fixed later on.

Anyway, not sure why I bothered to type all of this stupid writeup, but when I first saw a video of this game back in 2008-2009 or so I thought it looked pretty cool, but finally playing it it's something that just doesn't hold up, so I guess I cared enough about it. I might never even touch Evergrace, the music and color palette alone weren't anything that evoked any positive thoughts about that game.

[Blinge]

1. Eternal ring's walk speed is faster than anything else From's back catalog unless you're piloting a mech lol.
I can't remember there even being a sprint

2. No you don't have to randomly mash the ring system, you can in fact figure it out from the information in the manual.
Doesn't make it good or fun but its much better than wasting your time spamming.

The game very much seems like they rushed it to get it out on launch for a new console.
did you try the secret dungeon?

[Xan]

There is a sprint, it's a ring that you get from the first water dungeon. And the walking didn't feel fast to me, felt more annoying than not having the run in KF1JP.

No I didn't, I'm guessing it's the locked door at the start. I kind of rushed through it and the end boss and cutscenes being what they were put me off of the idea of replaying the game.

[BareKnuckleRoo]

Eternal ring's walk speed is faster than anything else From's back catalog unless you're piloting a mech lol.

Armored Core, Tank Tread only, no Boosting run when?

[Sima Tuna]

Always hover body so you can just chill in the instant death water zones.

[Blinge]

There are no instant death water zones in AC1 afaik
you always float

[Blinge]

There is a sprint, it's a ring that you get from the first water dungeon. And the walking didn't feel fast to me, felt more annoying than not having the run in KF1JP.

No I didn't, I'm guessing it's the locked door at the start. I kind of rushed through it and the end boss and cutscenes being what they were put me off of the idea of replaying the game.

Ah I've figured it out - thanks to some gamefaqs post.

You're playing the JP version where walk speed is super slow and there's a sprint ring
PAL/NTSC there is no such ring and you walk really fast at all times. I'd imagine we just walk at the JP sprint speed.

The first boss drops a ring that raises your exp gain instead.

[ryu]

the design in this keeps blowing me away

I had a similar experience with KF IV just last year. Fantastic game. And I definitely don't agree with Xan. If you want to make an argument for the game dropping off at some point, I'd say that's around the 90% progression mark where you're going to be disappointed realizing that the game is just going to be over soon with no more intricate dungeons left to explore.

[Xan]

There is a sprint, it's a ring that you get from the first water dungeon. And the walking didn't feel fast to me, felt more annoying than not having the run in KF1JP.

No I didn't, I'm guessing it's the locked door at the start. I kind of rushed through it and the end boss and cutscenes being what they were put me off of the idea of replaying the game.

Ah I've figured it out - thanks to some gamefaqs post.

You're playing the JP version where walk speed is super slow and there's a sprint ring
PAL/NTSC there is no such ring and you walk really fast at all times. I'd imagine we just walk at the JP sprint speed.

The first boss drops a ring that raises your exp gain instead.

Well yeah, I did mention that I played the JP version.

I've also checked the US manual and found the information about the rings that you mentioned (it's on page 18 and not 15 like it says, but whatever). Guess what, this is not in the Japanese manual either, only useful thing that one tells you is to place at least one of those magic stones on either side. It does have gems like "we recommend to save before entering a new area" though.

It's not unexpected that they would change things like that for the overseas releases. I do wonder if any of the KF games have differences beyond the button mapping (attack is triangle in the JP versions and not square, if anyone didn't know). And in King's Field PAL, they changed it to something else yet again for some reason.

[Blinge]

alright well i just became aware of the version differences today

[Sima Tuna]

There are no instant death water zones in AC1 afaik
you always float

I was thinking of AC3 and Silent Line with their missions where you start on a little boat and the entire map is death water.

[Sumez]

I had a similar experience with KF IV just last year. Fantastic game. And I definitely don't agree with Xan. If you want to make an argument for the game dropping off at some point, I'd say that's around the 90% progression mark where you're going to be disappointed realizing that the game is just going to be over soon with no more intricate dungeons left to explore.

True enough. The final stretch feels like a bit of a downer only because you'd seen it all at this point. Though the last few location are pretty cool, and I love the free access you get to the whole "hub" area. KF4 is a brilliant game, and I'd probably rank it third among the classic KF-style From games:
King's Field 2 > Shadow Tower > King's Field 4

All three are very close though, and on another day I might rate ST higher.

[Austin]

Man, with regards to KF IV, I feel like I must have played a totally different game. It felt like a tedious slog to me. Made it about six hours in a few years ago and I threw in the towel.

[Sumez]

King's Field 4, as with all the other classic FromSoft games can be really hard to approach if you go into them with expectations of them being something other than what they are.
One really classic mistake is immediately trying to remap the controls to fit something more "modern", or even FPS-like. Doing that just sets you on a path where you're bound to fight the game's identity rather than going with it.


I originally played KF4 right after Demon's Souls came out, hungry for some more of that creepy unique From flavour, and word had it, DS had inherited that from the KF series. At the time I just bounced off on it completely.
I only returned to it many years later after having played both KF2, 3, Shadow Tower, *and* Eternal Ring, in their release order, which had prepared me much better for what to expect from 4. And that really helped me appreciate the game.

[drauch]

KF IV is done, and now I feel like an empty man. At least now I can watch the Blinge magic run . The Moonlight reveal was the stuff of dreams.

Still need to try out KF III, ST Abyss, and Eternal Ring, but I'll probably wait a bit to avoid oversaturation. Really want some more Echo Night, but not sure how stupid I am to buy the PS4 VR just for Deracine. A friend had the VR and said I could borrow it, but I waited too long and he sold the damn thing. I'll probably cave and buy it anyway, 'cause what use is money when I can't save ghosts from purgatory.

[Blinge]

Oh gosh.. playing KF3 last? that is a very strange order

[Immryr]

it's crazy that they made everything even slower in KF4.

[drauch]

Oh gosh.. playing KF3 last? that is a very strange order

Yeah, I don't know how I ended up here. Had a long gap between KF II and now and was really itching for something from the PS2 era. Thought I also recalled that KF III isn't held in the highest regard? Granted, it's been years, but I had that in my head as well.