Dark Souls III: what to keep, bring back, leave out or change?

[bartholen_v1legacy]

While waiting for Dark Souls III, let's think about what features from the series (including Bloodborne) you'd like to see kept, brought back, and... well you read the title. Here's a small list of mine, without having played Bloodborne:

1. Keep the bonfires next to boss fights. DSII was a bit too generous with bonfires in general, but having them right next to tough boss fights is something I'm in retrospect grateful for. Because after going back to DS1 a bit and spending an hour fighting the Bed of Chaos, most of which was spent just running back to the fight and then getting knocked down to a pit again, didn't exactly feel challenging. Or rewarding. Or entertaining. It's just a pointless waste of time. Same goes for Demon's Souls. Fuck you Valley of Defilement!

2. Keep the upgrading system from DSII. It's just the most intuitive and least fussy of the series. No contest. Demon's Souls' system led you to hoarding materials you never used, and DS1's was rather clunky and unintuitive.

3. Bring back Estus being single speed. This is probably a matter of taste, but I prefer the Estus being a single, reliable use, not something I have to ponder on while choosing my stats. If you made a tank build in DSII and chose not to put much into ADP, successful heals in some boss fights bordered on impossible.

4. Change how the turf covenants operate. Having to wear a special ring if you wanted to take part in the Bell or Rat King covenant PvP invasions was IMO ultimately crippling, and may have left many players without experiencing them. It works fine as long as the playerbase is big and invades frequently, but now you'll be hard pressed to be called to defend your turf even once in a session (at least where I live). This could perhaps be an item you could activate and deactivate separately, depending whether you wanted to partake in the invasions or not.

There's a start. Your turn.

 

[stroopwafel]

Atmosphere and world-design of Dark Souls 1, menu interface and upgrade system of Dark Souls 2, gameplay(combat) somewhere between Dark Souls 2 and Bloodborne and the game having the general polish and high level of consistent design quality of Demon's Souls and Bloodborne.

They have a lot of experience making these games now so DkS3 should be something special.

Also the soundtrack, amazing as ever.

 

[meiam]

Remove the invincibility frame from the dodge and reduce the enemy crazy tracking (giant ass monster spinning like a ballerina to hit you when your behind there back). I think it's far more interesting to have to always consider where you are in respect to the enemy than just having to time when you press circle.

I'd actually remove armor upgrade and bring it back to demon soul system. Weapon upgrading make sense since every weapon has a different movies, but armor doesn't really make any sense, it's far better to just have every armor being balanced with each others. Otherwise whenever you get a new piece of armor you need to look up on a wiki if it's worth upgrading.

Connected world, that was one of the best things about dark soul, I understand it's hard to do, but it's definitely worth the time and effort.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

Keep the number of rings you could wear in Dark Souls II. Helped a lot in building certain characters.

Go back to the level design (shortcuts, continuations that make sense) of Dark Souls. Also, the world-building, story telling style as well.

The speed of Bloodborne felt amazing. I wish they could find some way to keep that, but I don't think it's possible. I would love to be able to stay on my feet when I dodge an attack though.

I swear to God, if they put in level 3 covenants that can only be reached by winning (not killing, WINNING) five hundred invasions/duels online, I am going to murder someone. That was just nonsense. At least you can buy those spells on your third playthrough, but come on guys. Who thought that was a good idea?

 

[Mister K]

I didn't play DSII, but my major gripe with Dark Souls was that, unlike Demons' Souls, it's open world-ish. I'd rather have it be more like DeS in this regard.

Also, nothing like Face Eater, please.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Atmosphere and world-design of Dark Souls 1, menu interface and upgrade system of Dark Souls 2, gameplay(combat) somewhere between Dark Souls 2 and Bloodborne and the game having the general polish and high level of consistent design quality of Demon's Souls and Bloodborne.

I quite agree with this. I loved Dark Souls, still do but I'm ever the superfan of Demon's Souls first. I feel that while Dark Souls had a lot of great things, I still did not find it as engaging nor as fully realized as Demon's Souls, especially the level design and good lord that introduction. Straight up tells you exactly whats going to happen through most of your playthroughs. Demon's Souls did something I'd never thought a modern game could do, it made me realize that I was going to die, it was my master and I its eternal slave, doomed to repeat the Sisyphean task of trying to do a perfect run.
Demon's Souls (and the subsequent sequels) feels like a kid who played Ghosts n' Goblins on NES grew up and said "I'm going to take that frustrating yet fun game, make it over again in 3D and crush the will of a whole new generation."

 

[loa]

Less armor guys and more creative enemy designs (forget about dark souls 2 and do a bloodborne), no more beginners trap stats (adaptability/resistance. Playtest your things goddamnit!), no 50 greatswords and more weapon variety so not every build always ends up with some darn greatsword, itemize magic like in bloodborne and get rid of that clunky catalyst nonsense, please no more infuriating slow-motion estus sipping, make pvp something you opt in instead of forcing that broken laggy piece of garbage onto everyone, no lame standard fantasy story about kings or whatever in which everything gets spelled out for you, you were dead guy with a halberd in dark souls 1 and that's it. That's all that was needed.

And for the love of god, don't gate leveling your stats behind some npc that keeps whispering the same lines under their breath every single time you want to do something and only serves to put 2 loadscreens between you and leveling up your things. Stopit.

 

[Evonisia]

I've not played Demon's Souls, but:

Keep the maze style level design of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, but with Bloodborne's more plentiful or easier-to-access routes back.

Leave out the horrible slow rise of health given by the Estus Flask from Dark Souls II (given that Estus will obviously be back).

Bring back the monster-style bosses from Dark Souls. Bloodborne's bosses were particularly awful for mostly being humanoid or very skeletal and thus hard to hit which is simply frustrating given how they can very quickly destroy you (if you faced an NPC Hunter, the Lightning Skeleton Dog thing or the very first boss of the game you understand my pain).

 

[EvilRoy]

- PLEASE do not spam humanoid bosses. What made Dark Souls unique was the certain amount of humanoid bosses but most were monsters or humanoid like creatures (Quelaag comes to mind). Dark Souls II gave us too many humanoid bosses, and it got kind of tiring if not forgetful. Only acception was Rame the Fume Knight. Bosses like that are A+ material to have.

- Less bonfires. Too many made the game easy for me, and some didn't make any sense as to why it's there (Look at Huntsman's Copse in Dark Souls II where there's a bonfire after you knock a dead tree down as a bridge. Why not have it before the bridge? Totally dumb).

I'll second these two items with a few riders. Not only do we need less humanoid monsters, we need less obviously derivative monsters. DSII's The Rotten was a bargain bin muppet version of DSI's Gravelord Nito, which is more than a little disappointing considering Nito was one of the most immediately visually intimidating lordsouls, in an area of the game based around spook factor. The twin dragonrider fight was also a joke of an homage to O&S, two strikingly unique characters who stood out despite being clearly themed to the knight-trope area.

As far as bonfires, I think less is a better option as well. I liked being able to immediately teleport around, because it made deciding to try another route less irritating of a decision to make, but less bonfires better placed would not really change this. I went through DSII a couple times before I even realized I was missing bonfires constantly just because they were generally redundant.

I will say that I fought the fight with the old king in DSII to be fairly poignant. It actually came during a part of the game where I was explaining a bit of the story to a friend, and trying to tell him the sort of miserable fate that awaits even the toughest of undead. Few better visual metaphors I think, and the musical cue was fantastic.

On a technical basis I really appriciate DSII's improvements to the menue system, as well as their call to add a reasonably reachable mechant who would buy your crap without having horrible teeth or a gross hacking noise. Additionally, the stat system was a great improvement considering that very few if any of the stats were actually 'useless' like resistance was in DSI.

EDIT

Oh yeah and fuck the constant NPC invasions from DSII. I don't give a shit about that forlorn asshole, I just want him to sod off. Once was fine, but this prick is following me all over hell for some reason.

 

[Azure23]

My wishlist:

I want to be able to turn the camera independently of the targeting system. I don't want the camera angle to change when I target something and I don't want to be looking down at the ground when there are tall as well as big enemies around me. One of the most frustrating boss fights for me has been the big dog with his little poisoned minions in Dark Souls II. The camera looks right down at the little minions on the ground while the huge dog is out of sight.

A less binary damage system. A system in which you have to conserve your HP over more hits, rather than a system in which two hits kill you and constant healing is required. Then even that out with fewer healing items.

Remove or mitigate the combat roll. I want to be able to dash and sprint sideways and backwards, instantly.

The new ready stance is close to something I wanted: For the characters to enter a fighting stance when they target enemies, to delay the time between a button press and an attack. The characters always hold the weapons down at their sides, unless they're great swords. In a fighting stance, the character might hold a long sword with the point aimed at the enemy, reducing the delay. Also, I want customizable attacks. Maybe instead of a magic user you could choose to become a better sword fighter who can select from more fighting stances with the magic slots.

I want parries to be timed. You could remain in the defensive position by holding the defense button, but the enemy might adjust or find another opening, making timed parries more effective. Also, the characters should block with the flats of straight swords and carry medium and large shields on their arm rather than with their hand.

Good mouse and keyboard controls and an optimized HUD and item selection. I want to select spells or item (whichever I prefer) with the number row. I also want a dedicated shove/kick key, because I sometimes do that by accident.

Bring back the carry limit from Demon's Souls. Improve it. Maybe instead of having to leave items because you can't carry anymore, you could store them in the bottomless box or teleport them and then equip them at a checkpoint. I feel overpowered when I can pick any weapon and shoot 999 arrows in a battle. I like the strategy of preparation.

Better looking light armors and a few more minimalist armors. In fact, scrap all the old equipment, because it probably wouldn't exist in that time anymore anyway.

Night and day and weather cycles. When you rest at a bonfire, time passes more quickly. How much times passes would depend on how badly you were hurt.

More realistic looking characters. I want my body to be proportional and my face to look more human. I think they should look at photos of people when they design the faces. I want them to emote more and to rotate their heads with the camera. The NPCs as well. I want them to move around their environments more, like in Zelda. Maybe they could have different locations depending on the time of day.

Random enemy locations and patrols. This is why I played so much L4D and one of the reasons I liked Alien: Isolation. The gameplay is never the same. It keeps you on your toes.

Better AI. I want enemies to have more movesets and dynamic aggression, fear, cooperation and intelligence. In Dragon's Dogma, the ogres become enraged if you shoot them in the eye and in some games the enemies move more sluggishly or become angrier when they are close to dying. I like that stuff.

Gore.

An offline option. Players often kill immersion with their silly behavior and of course inevitable cheating.

More of the story told through actual experiences. Doesn't even have to be cutscenes. If you're just reading item descriptions, the character is not actually learning the information.

I'd like more to change after death, like new enemy locations and buffs for the enemy who kills you.

The game you are describing does not sound like a bad game, but it doesn't sound like Dark souls.

 

[Redryhno]

Keep the level design of DS2, but give the world the DS1 feel of immediate interconnectedness(DS2 had this if you paid enough attention to the map and lore, but only if you did that). DS1, if you look through it again, had some absolutely god-awful level design. Anor Londo, Izalith, and Blightown being the most obvious examples, but then there's also on your way to so much of Priory and all that. You start off by going through an aqueduct. Which would be fine if there had been any semblance of some kind of old destroyed bridge that was obviously the old way to go through the area, and let's not even talk about New Londo.

Keep the weapon variety of DS1 and 2, but give something other than swords as the high-end stuff that you can conceivably get on a run. Bloodborne was alright, but there wasn't really any variety in what you played through the game with(and for all the complaints of DS2 looking all the same, there's an astounding amount of re-used textures in BB)

If they decide to keep the prop-hunt item, they need to also keep Seed of Giants and maybe add some other bullshit for invasions. And speaking of invasions, make them an opt-out with a covenant or something somewhat far into the game that you can get to on a second run pretty early if you want to.

Bonfires, make them less redundant, but keep them close to bosses. I don't mind being drilled into a wall five seconds into a fight, I do mind being drilled in a wall five seconds in and then having to backtrack for ten minutes through a platforming section and enemies you can only run past if you start from the perfect angle after going through a platforming section. It's never been a boss that's been infuriating to me, it's all the minions that you have to wade through countless times.

Which leads into enemies. I'm going to agree and say that I'd like some lore back for each of the bosses again, maybe even just your run-of-the-mill enemies, the latter of which no game in the series/franchise has done all that well.

 

[stroopwafel]

Keep the level design of DS2, but give the world the DS1 feel of immediate interconnectedness(DS2 had this if you paid enough attention to the map and lore, but only if you did that).

The level design of DkS2 is actually quite good if you consider the game's troubled development. In the DkS2 design works it's apparent one of the game's directors, Shibuya, fucked up and Tanimura(another director) had to take over and re-use all existing assets for a new direction of the game(since Shibuya's direction wasn't Dark Souls at all). It's actually a miracle DkS2 turned out the way it did. If Tanimura had been the main director from the start(without involvement from Shibuya) the main game would have been much like the Lost Crown DLC which is generally praised by fans.

Fortunately it appears Fromsoft kicked Shibuya out though. And Tanimura is doing some level design work together with Miyazaki for DkS3 I believe. So yeah, DkS3 should be the best of both worlds.

Also my most favorite game being Bloodborne I love nothing more than longcoats, transformative meat cleavers, werewolves and 18th century gothic horror...but this is Dark Souls after all. Though I watched a walktrough of the DkS3 network test and many of the game's assets seems directly copied from Bloodborne with a Dark Souls paint. Espescially the square with the graves and the hulking giants near Oedon chapel not to mention there is a very similair bridge in DkS3 that looks just like the one on which you fight Cleric beast and Bloodborne's cathedrals seems to be making a presence in DkS3 in general. Even the combat in DkS3 looks like a dialed back/slowed down version of Bloodborne with Dark Souls 'chunkiness'.

Not a bad thing as these designs and combat are the absolute best and Bloodborne and DkS3 have been in joint development for quite a while but just something I've noticed.

 

[DementedSheep]

While waiting for Dark Souls III, let's think about what features from the series (including Bloodborne) you'd like to see kept, brought back, and... well you read the title. Here's a small list of mine, without having played Bloodborne:

1. Keep the bonfires next to boss fights. DSII was a bit too generous with bonfires in general, but having them right next to tough boss fights is something I'm in retrospect grateful for. Because after going back to DS1 a bit and spending an hour fighting the Bed of Chaos, most of which was spent just running back to the fight and then getting knocked down to a pit again, didn't exactly feel challenging. Or rewarding. Or entertaining. It's just a pointless waste of time. Same goes for Demon's Souls. Fuck you Valley of Defilement!

Yep ,I hate long run ups to bosses, especially ones that can one hit or that have a small window where they are hard to survive against but the rest of the fight is much easier (looking and you Lud and Zallen, that's the only boss fight in the Dark Souls series that I did once and never torched again).

2. Keep the upgrading system from DSII. It's just the most intuitive and least fussy of the series. No contest. Demon's Souls' system led you to hoarding materials you never used, and DS1's was rather clunky and unintuitive.

haven't played demon souls but I agree it's better than DS1

3. Bring back Estus being single speed. This is probably a matter of taste, but I prefer the Estus being a single, reliable use, not something I have to ponder on while choosing my stats. If you made a tank build in DSII and chose not to put much into ADP, successful heals in some boss fights bordered on impossible.

I don't mind either way for this one.

4. Change how the turf covenants operate. Having to wear a special ring if you wanted to take part in the Bell or Rat King covenant PvP invasions was IMO ultimately crippling, and may have left many players without experiencing them. It works fine as long as the playerbase is big and invades frequently, but now you'll be hard pressed to be called to defend your turf even once in a session (at least where I live). This could perhaps be an item you could activate and deactivate separately, depending whether you wanted to partake in the invasions or not.

Agreed, it is particularly annoying since most players are going to be using a life protection ring as well if they are PVEing while waiting so you only have 2 slots for rings. At least they removed the ring requirements for the WotB. I think they convents in general could have been better done. 500 pvp wins is a tall order, 500 more wins than losses...argh my completionist heart burns. CoC is a PVE covenant, after all it makes enemas harder and prevents you from summoning help, but you rank up in it with awestones that only very rarely drop from PVE and drop from invaders. Wouldn't it make more sense for you rank up in this covenant from defeating bosses while in it? Rats was an interesting concept but I didn't really work out IMO.

There's a start. Your turn.

The obvious one of lore and atmosphere more up to par with DS1.

Keep having additional enemies on NG+, it's much much more interesting than just buffing them and helps even out the difficulty drop from starting the game with good equipment. Half the difficulty in dark souls is knowing where enemies are.

I want to see more contrast between light and dark areas like you had in early trailers of DS2. I know a lot of players hate this but I like the dark areas where you need to use a torch or cast light. Not only is it atmospheric it also forces players to stop turtling and adapt. DS2 is too light, you barely need to actually use a torch so there are a whole bunch of braziers all over the place that serve no purpose beyond having a pretty flame effect if you light them.

They need to fix the backstab. You hit an enemy directly from behind, no backstab, You hit and enemy in the right arm, backstab! What? With players I get backstabbed from across the room but that's because my connection is shit. I don't know what is up with the positioning the rest of the time.

Which reminds me, I hope they redo some of the systems they have in place to not be framerate dependant.

Already been said many times but less dudes in armour. I like fighting dudes in armour, they tend to make the best bosses but it gets boring. that said on large and/or non-humanoid bosses they need to watch out that you can't just hug the back legs. I don't mind assets reused in general (although 3 games with reused armour might be a little bit much) but many of bosses in DS2 are very cut and pasted.

I don't know why I have to return to the Emerald Herald to level. You can teleport between bonfires and she is right next to one so all it seems to do is make you sit through a loading screen. Just level up at bonfires!

I think should bring back being able lock off invaders (to some trade off) because it is the number one reason why I see people who won't play the game and there is a lot for someone who doesn't like PvP to love.

With stats, strength should have secondary effect of increase your equip load. It won't be a huge amount of use to me because I don't often play strength builds but it seem weird to me that it doesn't.

Snip

- If Dark Souls III gives us the Chameleon Spell [http://darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com/Chameleon], it should also have the ability to turn into a Message. Bloodborne was clever to allow players to disguise themselves as Messages, since those can be posted anywhere in the game and nobody would become suspicious unless the Message moved on it's own.

NOOO! Finding an inconspicuous place to use chameleon and being tipped off to someone using it because you don't remember that damn barrel being there before is why that spell is fun. If you disguise yourself as a message you might as well have an invisibility spell.

 

[Redryhno]

Keep the level design of DS2, but give the world the DS1 feel of immediate interconnectedness(DS2 had this if you paid enough attention to the map and lore, but only if you did that).

The level design of DkS2 is actually quite good if you consider the game's troubled development. In the DkS2 design works it's apparent one of the game's directors, Shibuya, fucked up and Tanimura(another director) had to take over and re-use all existing assets for a new direction of the game(since Shibuya's direction wasn't Dark Souls at all). It's actually a miracle DkS2 turned out the way it did. If Tanimura had been the main director from the start(without involvement from Shibuya) the main game would have been much like the Lost Crown DLC which is generally praised by fans.

Fortunately it appears Fromsoft kicked Shibuya out though. And Tanimura is doing some level design work together with Miyazaki for DkS3 I believe. So yeah, DkS3 should be the best of both worlds.

Also my most favorite game being Bloodborne I love nothing more than longcoats, transformative meat cleavers, werewolves and 18th century gothic horror...but this is Dark Souls after all. Though I watched a walktrough of the DkS3 network test and many of the game's assets seems directly copied from Bloodborne with a Dark Souls paint. Espescially the square with the graves and the hulking giants near Oedon chapel not to mention there is a very similair bridge in DkS3 that looks just like the one on which you fight Cleric beast and Bloodborne's cathedrals seems to be making a presence in DkS3 in general. Even the combat in DkS3 looks like a dialed back/slowed down version of Bloodborne with Dark Souls 'chunkiness'.

Not a bad thing as these designs and combat are the absolute best and Bloodborne and DkS3 have been in joint development for quite a while but just something I've noticed.

The thing about Bloodborne, the more and more I think and see it, is that it's incredibly generic Gothic Horror. It's Poe and it's Lovecraft(who are amazing, don't get me wrong, especially Poe, always had a soft spot for him for whatever reason), but that's about it. No Kipling, Lorraine, or James to be found(that you don't have to make up yourself).

But as for DS3, I haven't really been paying attention to the promotional stuff beyond it being announced, but that sounds...boring...

Don't get me wrong, BB is nice, but there was too much of it that looked to be re-used, nothing FELT different, despite you going to different parts of Yharnam and the surrounding area.

But anyways, I think DS2 has nice level design as well, I just think they have shitty connections between alot of it. People talk about Harvest Valley up to the Old Iron Keep, but that entire time you're obviously walking up a building carved out of a mountain, and so I immediately write them off as not actually paying attention or(on this site at least) listening far too much to Alex from LRR, great guy, fun to listen to, wholly different opinion on what makes Dark Souls Dark Souls. But I'll take anything over the buttress in Anor Londo. It's not even the Dragon Bowmen that tick me off, it's the platforming and how every other buttress looks exactly the same, but you're not supposed to walk on them.

 

[Insideout Ink Demon]

I know it'll never happen; add pause.
now we have a young child in the house, i I feel i'll never get to play another Souls game

 

[Redryhno]

Keep having additional enemies on NG+, it's much much more interesting than just buffing them and helps even out the difficulty drop from starting the game with good equipment. Half the difficulty in dark souls is knowing where enemies are.

I want to see more contrast between light and dark areas like you had in early trailers of DS2. I know a lot of players hate this but I like the dark areas where you need to use a torch or cast light. Not only is it atmospheric it also forces players to stop turtling and adapt. DS2 is too light, you barely need to actually use a torch so there a howl bunch a braziers all over the place that serve no purpose beyond having a pretty flame effect if you light them.

Already been said many times but less dudes in armour. I like fighting dudes in armour, they tend to make the best bosses but it gets boring. On large and/or non-humanoid bosses they need to watch out that you can't just hug the back legs. I don't mind assets reused in general (although 3 games with reused armour might be a little bit much) but many of bosses in DS2 are very cut and pasted.

I don't know why I have to return to the Emerald Herald to level. You can teleport between bonfires and she is right next to one so all it seems to do is make you sit through a loading screen. Just level up at bonfires!

With stats, strength should have secondary effect of increase your equip load. It won't be a huge amount of use to me because I don't often play strength builds but it seem weird to me that it doesn't.

Snip

- If Dark Souls III gives us the Chameleon Spell [http://darksouls2.wiki.fextralife.com/Chameleon], it should also have the ability to turn into a Message. Bloodborne was clever to allow players to disguise themselves as Messages, since those can be posted anywhere in the game and nobody would become suspicious unless the Message moved on it's own.

NOOO! Finding an inconspicuous place to use chameleon and being tipped off to someone using it because you don't remember that damn barrel being there before is why that spell is fun. If you disguise yourself as a message you might as well have an invisibility spell.

I'm shit at formatting, so sorry if this seems a bit jumbled...

NO, additional enemies is what made parts of DS2 tedious. The way the system works it's not enjoyable to fight more than two or three. Lost Sentinels are nice, I love their design, but they are not fun to fight more than one at a time, which is something that's REALLY difficult to do.

They fixed alot of what you're talking about with Scholar of the First Sin in regards to light and dark.

I sorta liked going back to Majula to level, it reminded me to go check out the shopkeeps so many times because it forced me to think of the most efficient route to get back to baddie stabbing. Helped me alot with not hoarding and losing thousands of souls too because I wanted that ONE extra point.

And with the equip load, alot of the themes surrounding it is not so much how hard you hit, but how long you can keep going, and with that in mind, I don't mind Endurance being the equip load stat.

And I agree wholeheartedly with you about the Chameleon talismans, so many cheese strats you could do for shits and giggles on Sinner's Rise with Faith builds with the elevator. and the chance of wandering around as a dragon egg in the Aery...espeically when someome tried to do the dragon bridge interaction when they were invaded. Messages just...ugh, that's boring, it's an either you aren't noticed and you get the jump on them, or you're noticed and you get fucked. Chameleon at least gives that extra level of paranoia and cat-and-mouse memory game thing to it. Messages are just strewn about. Hell, I put down one at the Belltower at the base of the ladder that said to "try jumping" in DS1, got alot of clicks from that. Then the Centipede Demon with "use bow". DS2 there's just a satanic ring of messages clustered around the Gutter entrance in Majula with "GREAT TREASURE AHEAD" every time I've looked.