I posted a similar thing a while ago, and can't be bothered re-typing, so here is a copy of my last post on this:
Having only ever platinumed two games in my history (Dark Souls and Demon's Souls) I consider myself quite the fan of both of those two games.
However, neither one was flawless, however much i love them. They both did some things great, and let me down a touch in other areas. It's funny, most of the negatives i have about both games, are the same, but on opposite ends of the spectrum.
For starters
Crafting.
Demons was the (slightly) better of the two crafting systems in my opinion, however the sheer volume of different types of materials required, on top of the fact that there were some crafting items that were only obtainable through luck/farming/exploiting (eg Pure Bladestone, Pure Darkmoonstone, Pure moonstone) made for quite the mess in my opinion. However, the variety in the resulting upgrades and creations was fantastic.
Dark Souls on the other hand .. TOO simple. And the resulting crafted items/upgrades were in my opinion of course, dull and not creative.
I found the Boss soul weapons in Demons to be pretty damn good, and interesting to use for the most part, whereas dark souls most of the boss soul weapons were relatively limited in their use, and needed very very very specific builds to make them effective.
I am hoping they find a middle ground here... a little more depth in the system than dark souls, but not as convoluted as demons souls. Boss Souls Weapons need to be moderately powerful to use for any build, ridiculously effective if your build is specifically for the weapon, and somewhat difficult to upgrade a weapon to. Narrow the choice of weapons that will upgrade specifically to a boss weapon, and make the progression of upgrading make sense. You learn the move set of a scimitar, you upgrade your scimitar so it is much more powerful.. then it upgrades to a unique scimitar (that you have been practicing with all this time), not to.. say a greatsword, which is a completely different moveset and gameplay style.
Unique armor upgrades would be nice too. Boss soul armors would be amazingly fantastic.
I'm sure there is more i've thought of that i haven't mentioned, but those are the big ones in crafting.
Critical Hits (BS and Riposte)
I would love to see very different outcomes based upon weapons being used by the player performing BS or Riposte, and make it dynamically interact with the gear that the victim is wearing.
Some examples.
Perform Backstab with Dagger - Very High damage against cloth/light armors. Moderate/High damage against plate armors but cause high weapon durability loss. Little to know damage against player with a shield holstered on their back.
Perform Backstab with Blunt Weapon - Low/Moderate base damage against all. Causes debuffs such as stun or stagger or cripple. Some kind of debilitation in line with disorientation. A different level of debuff depending on armor type you are attacking. More difficult to perform than with a dagger.
And so forth, haven't figured out all of them, but i think all of them should be different, as it would certainly make for more interesting PVP, and allow for more variation in how to tackle different enemies.
I'm sure many many players experienced the frustration of being an "average" player in PVP and just being one shot backstabbed repeatedly, whether due to skill or latency. I know was one shot backstabbed a lot of times from what appeared to be an enemy 3 meters away standing in front of me.
PVP
Well, i never got a chance to do a lot of PVP in Demons so i certainly don't feel like i can authoritatively say how well it worked, but, for players with high-ish latency, dark souls was horrible. See above.
The main problem with pvp was the heavy use of backstabs, and the way too easy to exploit invincibility frames. With the ideas for backstabbing above, i think it would shift the focus of pvp away from backstabbing, or funnel it's use into a more tactical thing than just omfgpwn damage.
Invincibility frames on the other hand, a little harder to fix.. not sure how it will go, but from what i've heard they scale with the weight of your armor, so hopefully this makes it a more interesting dynamic.
Magic/Pyro/Sorcery etc
Sorcery in Demon's was kind of easy mode through the game. It was way overpowered, and waaaaaay to easy to do..well..everything. My first mage character for instance, at about level 60 cast two spells (homing soul mass) at the false king and he fell over.
Learning how to mage in Dark though was bad. I don't have a problem with the limited use spells etc but for new players, trying to be a mage type character was quite close to impossible without looking up guides and the like.
I'm hoping they have found a middle ground between this, but we shall see.
World/Character tendency.
Please for the love of god bring something like this back. Not as convoluted and difficult to manipulate as demons but SOMEthing
Such a unique and magnificent mechanic. I missed it in Dark souls a lot.
I don't see with the seamless world how they could do a world tendency easily, though i'm sure they could, but character tendency could be implemented easily enough.
Please i want it back.
Anyways, just a couple of things i'd like to see in DS2, any other suggestions or thoughts on my thoughts most welcome.
March, hurry up damn you.
