Dark Souls II - New Editorial & Q&A

Couchpotato

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From Software has a posted a new Q&A on the steam forums that answers a few questions about the PC release of Dark Souls II.

Now that Dark Souls II is out on PC we (Bandai Namco Games) would like to field any on-going or outstanding questions you have about the game. We see comments, concerns, bug reports, rants, and raves all over. And it's quite difficult to keep up with all the different conversations happening in different places. But we'd like to help you get answers to some of your questions regarding the game. Bear in mind that we are not the developers, that honor still sits with FromSoftware, but we are constantly sending feedback their way. We're committed to making sure your opinions are heard and you have a great Dark Souls II experience.

We'll do our best to answer any questions posted in this thread. If there's a question that we don't know the answer to or can't answer at this time, we'll try to notate that.

If you have questions about ongoing bug reports, cheaters, bans, game functionality, leave them in this thread and we'll update over the next few days with as many answers as possible.
And it seems Forbes has another article where they call it the worst game ever made.

We have reached a point in our modernization where it seems we are more indebted to our symbolic objects than the people we live amongst, in terms of both time, energy, and attention. If we are indeed advancing through history and not treading water or actively receding back into it, our progress might be traced through our willingness to exchange one another for symbolic succor, and the farther we progress the more interchangeable the game and the player become . The longer I spend on these quests for achievement and advancement, the more I wish to have never begun them at all. I can think of no worse end to an undertaking than to regret its conception, and for me there can be no better measure for saying Dark Souls II the worst game I’ve ever played.
More information.
 
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Personaly I'm in the "Dark Souls II is one of The Worst Game Ever Made" Team, with just may be an extra detail… on PC.
I don't know for console version but the PC version totaly sucks probably because of it's horrible portage.
It's simple : If you try to play with a mouse and keyboard (like any PC player should) you will most likely throw this game to the bin within less than an hour because it is not playable (I mean not playable with fun… of course you can play it with a mouse and keyboard but it's too painfull to enjoy the game).
And it's terribly annoying to see all the instructions on the screen refering to gamepad buttons. You know, like "press A" to enter… but the A is NOT the A on your keyboard no, that would have been too simple, the A is the A of the gamepad, and the "translation" for your keyboard is "enter". So, when the game tells you to "press A" you have to repress the natural reflex to press A on the keyboard and, instead remember that you have to press, in fact enter. And it's like that for all the action made by gamepad on a console.
For me this is clearly a failed PC portage (I can't believe it would have been that hard to add a routine which check if the PC user plays with a gamepad or mouse/keyboard and adapt the instructions on the screen) and it totaly transform this game into one of the worst even made on PC with mouse/keyboard.

And I must add that the portage issue is not the only one : I've only played one hour (before uninstalling it in anger) but the gameplay doesn't also seemed to me at the level expected in 2014.
- the graphics are not good (I'd say 2007 level may be)
- your hero is unable to do some basic actions : for exemple, in the first village guy ask us to help him enter a house. The door is looked but there is an opened window on each side of the door… but you can't enter by the windows because your hero is unable to make a little jump or 'escalade' a windows at ground level (so no more than 1 meter high... how difficult is that ?). What a great realism !
- the 'ambiance' (sound of birds, birds flying in the sky, so on) is null… the world in which you are seems empty (it lacks some sound, some animals, so on).
 
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Dark Souls 2 not Worst Game Ever

To balance that Forbes original article - Erik Kain (who is more of an RPG fan based on his interesting body of work) responded here.

Regarding K&M on these games, yes that sucks bigtime. It's hard enough with a controller. Hard, but rational. I am not esp. happy to have had to buy an Xbox 360 Controller, but the game (DS1 Prepare to Die at present) makes up for that pique. So challenging and rewarding that going back to Skyrim is going to feel like a trip to Disneyworld by comparison.

And as a newbie poster, thanks v much for all the news and commentary since I've been following this site from the shadows.
 
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I've already posted specifics in other threads so I won't go into detail. It takes some time and most likely a third party program or 2 but you can get the game to run perfectly fine with mouse and keyboard. I could anyway and it very fun.

I agree with the point though that the vanilla K&M is crap and you shouldn't have to jump through hoops but if you want to play the game and can't or don't want to use a controller then there's not much choice.

As for the article I didn't read much of it and what I did seemed to be no more than irrelevant gibberish but it's not even close to the worst game ever.
 
I managed to get K&M working at a level I'm happy with without using any 3rd party programs. However it took me about an hour to do, and if I were not a DS 1 fan I'm not sure I would have been that patient.

The real issue is just how little effort the developers put into giving K&M users a good experience. It would have taken so little effort on their part to have made it better, or to at least have made it easier to make my own changes so I wouldn't have to waste an hour before I could start playing. But they didn't care enough to do it, and I doubt they will care enough to make the incredibly minor patch it would take to fix it.

But at the end of the day, it's still a great game, and I'm still very happy I bought it.
 
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Anyone claiming that Dark Souls II is the worst PC port ever made hasn't played a lot of PC ports. I can say that confidently without even having played it yet.

In fact, it's a really dumb statement considering that DS2 is an obvious improvement over DS1 at least.
 
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Is Gronolife a troll? He sounds like a troll. Any game that doesn't allow you to climb through a window "lacks realism" and is shit. And RPG gamers have been graphics whores since 1978.... right? Wait.... so PC RPG fans never used to care about graphics prior to '08??? REALLY??? All news to me. LOL
 
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The console buttons on the PC version are indeed anyoing, Nevertheless it is the first action rpg that keeps me interested for more then days. Great game, not perfect, but a great.
 
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So this dude who wrote the article got pwnd by an optional boss towards the end of the game for 5 days and decided to wrote a hate article instead of manning up and either beating the boss or leaving it be. Congratulations for that.

It's not even really challenging, rather, said boss requires quite a lot of tries to find a good, dependable way to be dealt with. Or watch a vid or two if you can't do it by yourself. If you are the kind of compulsive person who does not want to look for help no matter what, you'll have a harder time, yes. This is one of the last bosses, completely optional, and very difficult to get it right. It can be beaten with on any build, guys running naked with a teaspoon do it on youtube. I did it in about 12 tries. Am I a good player? I don't think so, so anyone else should be able to do it.

As for the K&M issue, I can't believe people are still bitching about that. I have been playing the game since day 1 with out of the box controls. I took 15 minutes to remap keys and test out how they work. The only thing that took getting used to a little is the clicking thing: if you keep clicking, your character will do nothing if you leave double click settings blank. However, if you learn not to click away like a madman but leave a beat between clicks, you'll have no trouble at all. There's no 'input lag' people claim, there's only this double click thing you can get over in an hour or bitch about for months. It took me 1 hour to get used to and another few to master. Did I die in the process? Sure I did. That's what the game is all about. It sure could be better, yes, but it's no big deal if you quit being an entitled whiner and adapt a little.

Should I also mention these people who whine excessively about DS2 are the same people who turned a blind eye in a flash to Skyrim menus being useless without modding on PC or terrible paratrooper spawns and endlessly reused assets in Dragon Age 2?

Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 are fantastic experiences and great games that are hard to get into and demand a lot from players. They could be improved in a lot of ways of course, any game can be. Still they have more soul and ingenuity than most other games coming out these days. I can appreciate if some people can't get into them because of this, but then be honest about it. 'Worst game ever made', seriously? Pathetic.
 
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The only thing that took getting used to a little is the clicking thing: if you keep clicking, your character will do nothing if you leave double click settings blank. However, if you learn not to click away like a madman but leave a beat between clicks, you'll have no trouble at all. There's no 'input lag' people claim, there's only this double click thing you can get over in an hour or bitch about for months.

There is a mouse lag, believe it or not - pressing the keyboard buttons for light and heavy attacks is without delays, but the mouse buttons do suffer from a lag, for one or two clicks.

Not saying that DS2 is not a good game, on the contrary, it is magnificent. But the surprise is with the idiots who programmed it to work on mouse and keyboard.

Why do we have to spend hours and use third party programs to implement a basic functionality that is a core feature since the dawn of the x86? Just pathetic, for a game that critically depends on accurate timing.
 
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If there is a lag from mouse input I could not detect it, I even tested it to see what people are talking about. That said, my mouse is pretty brutal, so that may be a factor.

And no, I don't have pink glasses on, I'm totally with you on this. Dark Souls 2 imho does have certain areas where it is lacking compared to the first (and some where it excells), and it could be made much better with fully customizable controls and no double click/mouse lag issue. It's not even a big deal, so I can't grasp why it hasn't been patched in yet.

But it's lightyears from being the worst game ever.

This Forbes article is curious, because it seems to list and detail every aspect that makes us love the Souls games as negatives. I don't quite get it, unless the author wanted to troll people. However, his overly pseudo-intellectual drivel makes him come across as jerky, to me anyhow (sounds more like someone who wants to write literary criticism but has to write gaming reviews). Plus the author spent 150 hours with the game. Makes me question every word of his 'review'.
 
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Soulbane, I agree DS 2 is a remarkable achievement that I can not stop playing.

Reviews saying that DS 2 is a bad game are worthless and indication of lack of knowledge of the game, its mechanics and the large number of variables available to the player to experiment with.

As I also mentioned in another thread, that I think that DS2 is more accessible due to the increased number of bonfires (mind you some of them are really in the middle of a battlefield!), and limited respwns. I therefore recommend anyone who had difficulty and committment issues with DS1 to try DS2.
 
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