Dark Souls 2: The Mea Culpa

Scholar of the First Sin, the current patch rolled out this week for From Soft's punishing action/ RPG Dark Souls 2, is acting as both a free expansion to the current game and a lead up to a rerelease for current-gen consoles and beefier PCs in April. What the differences will be with what we all downloaded a few days ago versus any additional changes seems to be a little murky, but what we've already gotten seems to be one thing and on the thing only: an apology.

Pack your bags, we're heading into spoiler territory.

Dark Souls 2 was not a perfect game. While still definitely one of the absolute best of last year, the fan reaction From Soft's third Souls game had taken issue with a few of the game's finer points, mainly the lack of compelling NPC characters, a final boss worthy of the death march it takes to get fight it, and a proper ending befitting the nature of the rest of the series. In one fell swoop, From decided to try and rectify all three.

First, as you no doubt have seen, an amorphous blob of a character named only The Scholar was placed in key locations through the game: first in the Black Gulch after fighting The Rotten, next in the entrance to the Undead Crypt, then at the bonfire at in the Dragon Shrine, and finally after defeating Nashandra at the Throne of Want where he becomes the game's final boss. It's a fun scavenger hunt to track him down (unless someone ruins it for you like I just did), but more so compelling for his cryptic dialog. I have to be honest in that I've only just noodled around with the content patch with one character and there is an opportunity for multiple choice in some of his dialog, The Scholar reveals himself to he Aldia, brother to King Vendrick and an enigmatic figure to the game's larger lore.

Smarter people than me will do extensive research into every syllable of Aldia's new dialog, but we can surmise up to the point the patch was released is that Vendrick and Aldia had sniffed out the evil of Queen Nashandra, and that the two of them worked tirelessly to either cure or at least circumvent the curse that was turning humans into insane, zombie-like husks; a process called hollowing. Aldia's presence in the main game had been that of a shadow looming over what's actually going on in that he never appears, but is mentioned in NPC dialog and a few choice item descriptions. Aldia was known for strange experimentation (as evidence in all of the surrounding context clues in the Aldia's Keep area), and many have inferred that he had created Shanalotte The Emerald Herald basically in a test tube as part of his attempt to stem the curse.

After revealing his identity to you at the Dragon Shrine, the new dialog implies that disparities caused by both life and death and, more importantly, light and Dark (capitalization intentional) is a lie and the curse isn't as important as trying to find something else in between, or maybe completely outside of it. A nebulous concept, sure, but compelling enough for Reddit users to fall over themselves trying to decipher. It's still answering questions with questions, as far as the lore is concerned, but this is just the Dark Souls way, and while Aldia himself is compelling enough just for the sake of being there, he still doesn't have much of a character arc that we can puzzle out at this point. So, while his inclusion as an NPC exposition dump is a little suspect for right now, he gets a temporary pass for being nothing but just that.

As a boss, though, he's a little less forgivable. The first Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 have both come under a little fire for having weak sauce final battles. While still difficult in their own right, compared to other enemies fought along the way (and, especially in Dark Souls 2's case, just beforehand) they're kind of a joke. Not to keep dumping on it, but over the course of its short life, Dark Souls 2 has done nothing but make the final conflict with Nashandra easier with items that can be obtained through the individual DLC expansions, and when all three DLCs are completed, gives you a massive safety net with the Crown of Vendrick item. Aldia as an enemy pops in just after this fight is complete following a brief bit of dialog. But it's a slog; Aldia retains his barely mobile blob-like form, essentially shooting things at you that can easily be avoided. While it takes a degree of patience to finish since he's usually wreathed in a shield of fire that will do more damage to you than you could to him, it's not a very satisfying battle, and when done with other players, is a bit of a joke.

If apologies have high points and crest like waves, though, it's in what happens after Aldia takes a dive. Another brief bit of dialog takes place, and a choice whether to sit on the Throne of Want or to leave it behind is clearly laid out to the player with two glowing beacons of light indicating which choice is which. While I think that how this is presented is a little too on-the-nose, the fact that you have a choice at all and the implications of which are fascinating. Not to sound lazy, but again, smarter folks than me will have much more to say on what these endings possible mean, but for a free patch, having an altered ending that nobody really expected to receive is certainly welcome.

I have my own theories in that some of this stuff may have been on the cutting room floor for the original release, but the fact that these three things are addressed after three DLC expansions (of which are seen as the best, most inventive parts of the game by many) is evidence that they probably weren't. There are still a lot of questions, too. First, I did this with a character that had already completed the game (but didn't start NG+) that had run through all three of the DLCs, so the path to the end with Aldia may be different without doing so. I haven't run into any replaced enemies in new locations, yet, either. I didn't take the Throne of Want at the end of the Aldia fight to see if it's any different than the original release, as well. But all of this stuff will probably be answered by the internet at large by the end of the day. What may be the best part of this patch is the re-written item descriptions, which the community is still parsing through. I noticed a significant change in Nashandra's Soul last night, and I can't wait to see what everybody else finds.

Plus, there's always the physical release for Scholar in April, and who knows what's going to be in that?

A Fighting Chance to Live

After taking a week and half off from work to basically do nothing but intensive field research on Dark Souls 2 (you can divert your judging eyes now), I'm struck less by the showpiece new additions to the series compared to the last game -its expansiveness, for example- than I am by the subtle, yet significant changes to basic rules and old movements. After mulling it over and testing as best I can the differences without taking that much more time off, I thought I'd go into some depth over a few of the aspects that I find the most interesting. I suppose you could also call this something of a review after a fashion, because I can't help but be picky with the minutia just enough to form some subjective opinions about how they make up the larger game.

Grab yourself a cup of coffee. This is going to be long.

Let's start with the new wrinkles in character building and growth. While the addition of respeccing your character is definitely welcome and fun to mess with when the mood suits you, it does serve to ultimately make the game easier as growth decisions can carry a bit less weight than in previous games. I'll come back to this a little later, but even though the amount of needed items to rebuild your Undead from scratch are finite through each new game cycle, it's a bit of a let down to know that a safety net is underneath if you really screw it up. As such, I've limited myself to respeccing only once when I went from a heavy melee tank to a a more lithe, but brittle sorcerer. Let's talk about both.

First, the addition of a few new and rejiggered stat parameters really change how a tank can operate in DS2. Equipment weight is no longer tied to the Endurance stat and is now entirely made up by the Vitality. This means that in previous games, a melee fighter or damage sponge could only logically be responsible for two stats; Endurance and either Strength or Dexterity for their preferred weapon choices (Vigor -previously Vitality in DS1 and Demon's Souls- for HP growth goes without saying for nearly every build). Now that there is separate stat to add levels to for effective movement in heavy armor, players that build tanks are now roughly on par with magic-tossing characters, whom previously had to deal with not only their magic school stat of choice (Faith or Intelligence) but also Attunement for spell slots. In practice, though, I didn't really find heavy characters to be as affected by poor movements as the previous games. Even at 95% of my equipment weight, movement wasn't slowed to the point of DS1's sluggishness, and even rolling out of danger would be of use, something that in previous games would make a character with that kind of pudge seem like a stumbling drunk.

Magic doesn't seem to have the heft of the last game from an overall damage perspective. Monsters, and especially bosses, rarely reel from the pain of getting pelted with your shot of choice. I can only assume that this was done to actually make the game a bit harder on these types of players (and one of the few instances of it, but again, we'll get back to this) since it wasn't entirely out of the question in DS1 to suit up in some of the heaviest armor you could find and just blast away at certain bosses with lightning bolts knowing they they were absolutely going down before you would. Still, the addition of Hexes, a fourth, sort of hybrid magic discipline between Sorcery and Miracles is the most significant change. Since I've only really messed with Sorcery at this point, I don't have a lot of opinion on Hexes quite yet, but I like that there isn't a starting class with Hexes in this game, and that a player has to do a little digging and very calculated stat building to use them correctly as many Hexes require both Faith and Intelligence to work. As a quick aside, the starting classes also lack a Pyromancer, too, which was probably a smart move. Plenty of speed run videos for DS1 prove that Pyromancy could get pretty beefy pretty fast, and make much of the early encounters a joke to solo.

Though it might still be too early to tell, perhaps the biggest addition to the game is the Agility stat, which is governed by growth in the Adaptability stat. Adaptability basically takes the place of DS1's Resistance stat, which was fairly worthless overall as it only raised poison and fire resistances, which can be easily mitigated by common equipment. Adaptability, though, raises the resistances of a wider variety of ailments like petrification and curses, but as the sole way to reliably raise your Agility makes it noteworthy. Agility, then, is the catch-all for how quickly certain basic functions take place like drinking Estus Flasks and rolling (even with heavy armor equipped). Since it's only been about two weeks since the game's been in the wild and the PvP metagame is still finding its feet, this might prove to be very important as the next several weeks carry on. I'll let you do you own research down the road.

Overall, it seemed as though the amount of souls needed to gain levels felt less than the last game, and a quick jump to the wikis proves this to be true (compare this to this). Since I couldn't find a way to easily power level  as in the previous games (though I'm sure the internet has. I like the way it is, so I'm just not going to check), I enjoy this wimping down of things as a fair way to balance the game. Grinding level by level from fighting enemies in the world was almost non-existent for me, though. All of my growth came from fighting bosses, which I also felt was well balanced, too; an added reward for a job well-done. Speaking of which, chests for loot are certainly more plentiful this time around, and especially after boss fights, so the rewards for beating them were tangible, too.

Let's move on to the engine. I don't typically care too much for the technical side of a game so long as it runs well, and this is something that From Software has struggled with to greater or lesser extent since Demon's Souls, though that game ran at a consistent frame rate outside of a few very short, specific spots. It's logical to assume that the old engine simply wasn't built to adequately run an interconnected world of the size of the first Dark Souls with how badly the Blighttown section slowed everything down to a slide show. With two games under their belt and a new engine constructed to scale with next-gen and high-end PC hardware, you would think that FromSoft has learned to make the aged PS3 and 360 sing at this point. Sadly, that's not the case from what I've seen.

While nothing within the game comes close to the stuttered mess of Blighttown, frame rates generally drop when the camera moves too fast and enemies or debris storm around you. The Havok physics work very well when you're in a confined space and are smashing through all of the tables and boxes in near proximity, wider open areas with this happening can stutter things here and there. Since this is a game where every minor encounter judged incorrectly can make for significant tension, a dropped frame here and there can certainly break your rhythm, especially if you're taking on three or four enemies, melee-style. Environmental stream loading is also slow to catch up to your travel plans, too. Run too quickly through a series of rooms and larger areas and the game will lock itself for a second or two until everything catches up. Typically, this isn't much of a hassle since you're probably just passing up anything of interest (or danger) if you're trying to move this fast, but for a new engine, this is a little on the strange side. All of this also comes at the cost of making your hardware really dance for its meals. Part of the reason I'm writing this is to give my poor PlayStation a break since just about everything in the game is constantly loading and pushing the disk around. Anecdotal evidence as this might be, it doesn't seem to be as bad as playing Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen (which worked my system to the point that it sounded like a helicopter was going to land on my television), but after the 45+ hours I put into the game during week one and the dozen or so more since then, I'm fearing for the longevity of my PS3. Wasn't the forced installation when I loaded the game supposed to alleviate this?

Probably the most irritating hiccup, though, is how easily your PvE foes can cheese the physics of the game and pound you through a wall. On more than one occasion, I would slip outside of a doorway to let my stamina recover or to take a quick swig of my Estus Flask and have an arm reach right through the brick and pound me for a kill that, if we're being honest with ourselves, is cheap. Yes, it can sometimes work in your favor; a monster too large to fit through a doorway and stuck lumbering outside can be hit with distance-friendly overhead strikes from your giant club that should, logically, be stopped by the overhang of the door. Still, monsters and bosses always have a leg up on you with laser beams and swords mysteriously finding their way through solid objects and into your Undead's unsuspecting dome at a much more consistent rate. The Old Iron King fight in particular is hilariously strange for the consistently broken laws of physics, if not for being much harder than it probably was built to be.

This actually baffles me, really. While a lot has been made over the past week or so about how different (meaning, not as good) the game looks from the initial video unveiling of the game last year compared to what was actually shipped, anybody with taste will tell you that graphics are an ultimately minor component to a great game, especially if it runs well. Sure, it's not fair to say that Dark Souls 2 runs poorly, but a game of this size with a new engine built specifically to run it should be constructed well enough to at least solve the odd problems of its predecessor, which this engine only does most of the time. The better frame rate is certainly welcome and definitely handy, but the occasional dropped frame during heated fights and selective physics elicits a few more stink eyes than I would like.

Overall, the game does feel significantly easier than the last one. Enemies are certainly challenging and most of the bosses I fought were done in co-op just so I could see as much as I could in the time that I had, both of my character builds could easily take on just about everything with some forethought and deft movement (full disclosure, I spent more time as a tank knowing that I wanted to go through it pro-co-op). I'm certainly a different case than the green Dark Souls 2 player, though, in that I've got two games' worth of conditioning behind me, giving me clearer ideas on how to build effective characters and tackle most of the environments.

The addition to extinguish enemy respawns is controversial in this game compared to something like Lightning Returns (which handled it to great effect). Since every death in this series is meant to be a lesson, I suppose it's helpful when bad guys stop showing up after you kill them a few dozen times, but it takes away from the overall point of a game that wants you to learn from your mistakes. Granted, having the ability to reset them (and thereby make them more difficult) is a nice touch, I don't really find it to be necessary.

Having said all of that, NG+ is significantly harder than I was expecting. While enemies have their requisite 40-50% boost in stats that was true for the previous games, red phantom version of enemies are now placed in environments in key locations, and it completely changes the rhythm of the game. Imagine you're fighting a boss that you're pounding on because of the differences in your stats compared to the last time you encountered it. All of a sudden an explosion goes off behind you and now you're randomly engulfed in flame thanks to the two red phantom Pyromancers that spawned in the arena. It's actually one of the cool holdovers from Demon's Souls that are sprinkled through the game for those in the know (for you guys, imagine playing all the way through the game with a neutral World Tendency and then playing through it again in an unchangeable Pure Black WT. Totally different game). For those hunting trophies and achievements, the now super hard NG+ is a necessary pursuit since certain weapons and spells can only be found there, and fairly deep into it as well so you can't just play nuggets of it to get what you want. I haven't made my way to NG++ (or beyond) quite yet, but I'm a little terrified.

To compound this, you as a character will never overpower your enemies as in previous games. Though the Estus Flask can gain additional uses up to 12, and you can strengthen the amount of HP recovered to a level of +5, no way so far has been found to grow it past these 12 powerful gulps. That means that a thorough player can max it out in their first playthrough, making NG+ and beyond a much more daunting task. While the flask would also cap out in the last game, it was much higher and to a stronger degree, and something that couldn't be completed in one run of the game regardless, making NG+ easier on you (at least, incrementally).

Let's briefly discuss the death penalty, too. I haven't done a lot of research on this, but the idea of losing a portion of your total HP from one demise to the next seems to have been met with a fair amount of community consternation. At first, I thought this was an awesome callback to Demon's Souls, but in that game, going from Human form to Soul form gave other, subtler bonuses to a player even though they had fewer total hit points (specifically you would move almost silently and hit enemies harder, but I can't remember the exact percentage off the top of my head). These don't seem to exist in DS2, at least not that I've seen so far. More research is necessary.

I'll leave this to another time, but this taking of fan expectations and throwing it in their face is all part of the meta narrative established by the old Fire Keepers at the beginning of the game (they won't let you forget how often you're going to die and lose those souls). I expected nothing less, and wonky tech issues aside, makes Dark Souls 2 a very, very good game overall. Again, it's early, and the community still has plenty of mysteries to solve regarding what's really going on with some of the moving parts, but this is an exciting time to be a part of the game, so if you get a chance, find a wiki that you like and get involved.