In all seriousness here

Is this game truly one of the greatest games of all time? Why or why not?

Yes, one of them.

It's already had a big impact on how the industry develops games and triggered a sort of "hardcore revitalization" in terms of game difficulty.

yes it is. don't let Sup Forums tell you what to hate because Sup Forums is never right.

I really enjoyed it, but there's no way to play that shit without a guide or severe autism

OP here and I definitely agree with you. Many years from now this game is going to rightfully be regarded as not only one of the best games of all time but even an important game that innovated an industry at a time where it was in desperate need of innovative games.

who is Sup Forums

>but there's no way to play that shit without a guide
But that's literally the point of it.
The only thing that might give a new player any trouble is knowing how to get down the Abyss. Otherwise, the maingame is totally beatable without a guide.

Yes. It's fun to play, it has replayability and has a very unusual online system (yeah, I'm aware Demon's did all of that first).

Sup Forums-Video Games

False I only needed a guide once in the game and had I paid better attention I wouldn't have gotten stuck on what to do on that one part.

However the game on release was definitely way harder then it was after patches. Many enemies didn't even give souls.

>Is this game truly one of the greatest games of all time?
1 and Demon are

For sure but I definitely feel Dark is better than Demon's.

Demon's could really benefit from a remaster with some minor tweeks to it's formula to improve it.

Cancer

No.The great games of all time can't have something as objectively shit as Demon Ruins/Lost Izalith/Bed of Chaos.

It very much could have been one of the greatest of all time, but it needed more polish. As it stands it's just an incredibly good video game, not one of the best.

>some minor tweeks to it's formula to improve it.

What would you like to see changed?

the combat of dark souls would be one.

The combat of Demon's and Dark are close to identical.

Yes.

>hands off design running counter to industry trends
>a world that's more satisfying and fun to explore than just about any other
>combat and gameplay that make the player be aware of their surrounding, manage resources, be away of every move they make, and take every enemy seriously
>little exposition, but strong setting and scenario
>story told through gameplay
>fantastic aesthetic direction
>great boss fights, a dying art
>surprisingly deep as an RPG
>great variety in playstyle and weapon choice
>fantastic level design
>replayability off the charts

It's just too god damned good. Too bad the sequels weren't able capture half of that.

God damn, I completely forgot to mention multiplayer here That's damn good and unique as well.

And as others have mentioned, Demon's Souls is up there as well, it never gets enough credit.

Messages are there for exactly that reason, finished my whole first playthrough using just messages left by other players

Using a guide spoils you for the game's best secrets. . It's only real problem was covenant rewards requiring ridiculous grinding

Not him, but everything about the upgrade system. And I mean EVERYTHING about it.

>There's way too many different kinds of rocks.
>There's only 1-2 enemy types that drop each kind of rock (meaning your farming that enemy over and over because no where else drops it)
>You need shards/large shards and chunks all the way up to +10 for no good reason. Making each upgrade 12 times longer than it needs to be because as well as getting the chunk mats, you need to go back to the early enemies and grind them for the smaller mats
>Crystal Lizards don't respawn upon death and only trigger after every boss kill. If they despawn, they're gone forever.
>You had to get weapons to a certain strength (+3 or +6) with regular upgrades before you could convert it to a specialty weapon

Everything about upgrades were fucked

Having just gone back to replay and 100% DaS on Steam the final areas (archives, tomb, LI) of the game are unforgivable and will sadly lock the original out of a perfect score/GOAT in my mind.

Spoken like a guy who never played both. They are similar but not identical.

This post made me realize MGSV kind of took a page out of the same book in terms of story, like Dark Souls it's most climactic and bombastic moments occur in gameplay rather than a cutscene, IE

"Hey Solid, did I ever tell you about the time your "dad" took out an entire armored column in Africa singlehandedly with nothing but smoke grenades and some balloons? Yeah compared to that your tank battle at shadow Moses was some pussy shit"

To be fair the last one was exactly the same in DaS.

Not even close, nothing changed other than animations and balancing. Tweaking it to be "closer to dark souls" would be meaningless. That's like saying you want to tweak Dark Souls to have the same combat as the Artorias of the Abyss DLC

overrated

Dark Souls
>limited heals (unless you were a cheating bitch
>invaders can't use estus
>invaders had to go out of their way to find the darkwraith covenant or have to rely on the limited cracked orbs
>poise
>overall a heavier feeling in the combat
>different roll animations and even a ring that gives cartwheels
>estus flask
>spells have limited casts
>pyromancy doesn't even need any stats but souls put into the pyromancy glove
>spells and pyro can be casted faster if your dex is high enough

Demon's
>instant stunlocks
>tons and tons of grass
>harder to get upgrades
>less weapon variety = (dark having more = more gameplay options and differences that demon's lacks)
>a more simple invasion system overall
>phantoms have less health then the host
>faster gameplay speed overall and harder to get parries and backstabs

The games have tons of differences and that's just from a gameplay standpoint. There's also the fact that demon's lacks a plunging attack.

Go choke on dick.

>archives, tomb

Those areas are good. LI I'll give you that. That area sucked and few liked it.

I gotta agree with this. Dark Souls is a very good game and has had a major influential on the industry, but the later half of the game has some design issues. The strongest aspect to Dark Souls is level design, and the quality of the level design goes down hill after Anor Londo. Tomb of the Giants could have been better, and Demon Ruins and Lost Izalith are both just terrible. (Duke's archives is fuckin phenomenal tho).

My other issue is that I feel like there are very few boss fights that stand up to multiple play throughs. Once you understand what you're doing, most bosses are p easy. On the flip side of this, most of the few bosses that aren't too easy are for some bullshit reason. There are very few bosses that hit the sweet spot of hard but fair. (But those bosses, like Fatboy Slim and Artorias are some of my fave fights in gaming).

Dark Souls is fucking great, but has some issues that do hold it back from master piece status.

It's not like it's too hard to figure where to go next but it can be time-consuming.
If you get nothing out of wandering-sort of open world games there's nothing you'll miss by reading where you're supposed to go next.
If you really need a full guide for every area then you really are too casual, but getting a better general idea for direction is reasonable.

I don't like wandering around aimlessly until I maybe find where I'm supposed to go. It's why I can't stand walking simulators like Skyrim.

agreed. but the story, characters, fmvs, music, etc. are better in demons souls though.

I mostly agree.

It's a good game, yeah, but vastly overrated along with its series. None of the games it inspired were done right either because they focused on being hard, which they weren't, instead of just having simple combat with subtle world building and linked level design

Rev up those FashionBornes!

Are you me?

You forgot that the drop rates for certain upgrade materials were literally my ass. To the point were some stones are spoken of more as myths than anything actually attainable

I just like the Vampire Hunter-esc Van Helsing vibe that it gives off.

i love all the souls games, but i love das3 the most

That TonTon better be level 10!

Bloodborne deserves that honor more. It doesn't have anything like the Lordvessel areas to hold it back. And i'm sorry but The Old Hunters is a far better DLC than Artorias of the Abyss.

Does "one of the greatest games of all time" even mean anything anymore? It seems like practically any well-regarded games that are relatively well-known amongst the "gamer" crowd are some of the "greatest games of all time".
I could spend months playing nothing but games that are commonly called the greatest games of all time, it doesn't seem to be a very exclusive club. So yeah sure, throw Dark Souls in there too, it's a pretty good game, why not?

Why not both? Or better yet, all three.

wheres the capital v you retard

i dont know, das has more variety. more armor, more weapons, more magic, can two hand weapons at will, can place anything in the left hand (albeit not that well)
and now on pc it runs at 60fps, slap on some texture mods and you're good to go

Definitely one of them.

Too bad most people, including me, get sick just looking at the cover because we know the game inside out by now.

i feel das3 should be a mandatory souls title

DaS1+AotA=BB=OH > DeS > IK dlc for DS2 > DS3 > DS2 with the rest of the DLCs

This is the formula.

Just a shame about that whole "entire second half of the game being horrible" thing.

>excessive dof blur
>fxaa looking blur everywhere

Why. Why couldn't they have just used no AA or SMAA, why do they think blurring everything looks good? Even for screenshots this is the wrong type of DoF and blur.

>"entire second half of the game being horrible

i absolutely disagree, it's by no means "horrible".

at the end of the day, it's still Das, and those sections were at the very least amusing

Not him but DaS's later game was pretty bad in many areas.

>das3
>not das2 sotfs

tomb of the giants, grand archives, and new londo were fine

izalith was only horrible because of BoC. having to run through any area a hundred times would make me hate it

i didn't play softs, i refuse to pay for the same game + dlc twice

1 = 3 > 2 for me.

Playing 3 felt like playing 1 for the first time again, which is something special. Hope they stay true to their word and not milk the series.

> there's no way to play that shit without a guide

People like you are the reason video games are shit today.

Miyazaki won't be involved but you are fooling yourself if you think From's going to stop this gravy train.

I hope they are done with the series and they never make another souls or borne game again. EVER.

I like the series overall but it's time for the fire to fad into obscurity.

>greatest game
>when half the game(post os) is considered weak
>director had to apologize for an entire segment/boss
Nah

It's fucking horrible and that Sup Forums likes it just proves we aren't better than NeoGAF.

Literally bad or mediocre in every single way there is. Literally.

5/10 or 6/10.

...

Half of DaS1 is better than 98% of games released in the past decade. Even with a so called weaker second half it's still the best game of all time.

It's pretty horrible, user, maybe you should go back to NeoGAF.

Which did they apologize for?

Are these the so called shockwaves that people talk about?

It's not. It's a flawed gem that has a lot of cool things to offer but is filled to the brim with sloppy design, rushed content and technical issues. Feels very much like a lot of cult classic games but happens to be popular.

It's not GOAT but it's certainly one of the best from last gen.

>didn't play DeS
>didn't play BB
Opinion disregarded.

Lost Izalith and Bed of Chaos was really the only thing.

Oh yeah, fuck that boss. The area I could deal with but the boss was annoying as fuck.

Idiots really love to inflate the whole "second half was bad" nonsense. It's not that true. They love to exaggerate. While the game does dip a bit after the first half it's not to the extreme that neckbeards on the internet say it is. And only one area is of poor design.

>a bit
The later areas feature pretty much nothing that made the first half great. How is that "a bit"? Lost Izalith isn't simply bad, it's god awful.

BB was better
Also DS2

Explain to me how each area in the second half is bad in your opinion.

>but not Bloodborne

Demon Ruins, Lost Izalith and Bed of Chaos are actually awful. Like not just bad, they are the dirt fucking worst.

It's easier to list the things that are missing honestly.
Areas being relatively small but using all the available space effectively by densely packing it with shit. That's absent in favor of large empty areas with copypasted encounters and hardly any items to discover.
Areas being connected to each other, often in multiple ways which encourages and rewards exploration on top of making the world feel cohesive and alive. Completely absent since all the areas have one connection to the previous areas and lead to dead ends that you teleport out of.
Varied hand crafted encounters that challenge you in different ways. Also absent since the areas are more interested in copypasting familliar enemies all over the place with no thought (look at the skeletons in that one room, or the golems, or the butterflies, or everything in Demon Ruins/Lost Izalith.
Well made, challenging boss fights. Only Nito comes close to fitting the bill.

DS2 is trash though

Nito was a zerg2win for me

No game is flawless.
Name a single one without any issues. OP asked if its one of the best, not perfect.

It is my favorite game of all time. And trust me I played a LOT of games

Removal of item burden would make it a day one purchase for me.

Of all the flaws in souls games this is the most retarded thing you could pick.