Dark Souls II Previews

We have rounded up a few more previews for Dark Souls II, further detailing how the game diverges from its predecessor, and where it remains the same.

IGN:

Every time you die in Dark Souls II, your health bar drops a bit. Die enough and it will drop down to 50%. This is perhaps the most fundamental of the changes to Dark Souls’ basic mechanics. If you’re a bad player – one who invades a lot – your sin level will rise, and your health will drop below 50% down as far as 10%. Burning a human effigy is the only way to regain your human form and reset it – and that, in turn, leaves you open to more invasions (invasions can now happen when you’re undead, but they’re more likely when you’re human or playing in co-op). Plus, those effigies aren’t infinite. With every death, your chances at success are marginally decreased. I’m trying not to imagine the effect this would have had on my mental wellbeing during my ~70 attempts at Ornstein and Smough.

Other changes are more subtle. Burning items at bonfires opens up many possibilities: one item strengthens all the enemies in an area. On the equipment screen you can now see your character, whose appearance changes as you try out different equipment. There’s room on your undead fingers for four rings now, not two, allowing for more creative modifications to your stats and abilities. Also – and I’m not sold on this – there’s now voice chat during co-op, though it’s mutually opt-in. There’s also an item that can reset your character parameters, presumably enabling you to change your playstyle by redistributing your Soul Level points more easily.

Drangleic evokes the same sense of eeriness and fascination as Lordran; in an hour, I was already starting to see how the pieces of its world fit together, and every locked door or looming structure makes you wonder, with trepidation, what lies within. Dark Souls is so fascinating for many reasons, but the most important for me was that feeling of being an explorer in a place that perhaps no living thing had seen in many thousands of years.

VG247:

Adopting a different tact, I was able to retreat far enough with my heavy-set foes following me that one ventured onto a narrow tree trunk bridge and fell clumsily to its death. The other brute, either learning from its ally’s mistake or whose AI code simply didn’t allow it to stray far enough from its starting point to attempt the bridge, turned back. This highlights a long standing feature of the Souls games; that mix of deliberate planning and accidental fortune as the designed response gives way to emergent behaviour, which ensures you’re forever balancing on the knife edge between human and hollow.

I chased that thing back to the beach and killed it with my dagger but not before dying half a dozen times trying. When the deed was done there was no fanfare and no epic loot drop, just me on a deserted moonlit beach, having acquired a couple of thousand souls and the valuable knowledge of how to kill a brute with little more than a butter knife. Glory has seldom been celebrated very loudly in the Souls series; a moment of quiet satisfaction is usually all you’re afforded before you’re off to face the next challenge and that’s part of what makes it so very good to be back.

Elsewhere in Dark Souls 2, things have changed as much as they’ve stayed the same. There’s a broader range of character classes this time around, with the peppy and lightly-built explorer class that I opted for standing alongside more traditional options such as the soldier, sorcerer and dual-wielder. Bonfires still offer that same cold glow of hope, along with refuge, upgrade and fast travel options, while the new inventory system leaves a portion of the screen visible so that you can better see your character (and, more importantly, anything that might be creeping up on her). You can now equip four rings instead of two still an arbitrarily restricted number but then ten or twenty would be difficult to manage and there’s a hint at a more established and comprehensive covenants system.

Total Xbox thinks there are 7 reasons to worry about the game:

Friend summoning is made easier

In Dark Souls II, friend summoning is – not directly enabled, exactly – but made slightly easier by way of a new equippable item, the Name-Engraved Ring. With it, players can pledge allegiance to one of ten gods, and if their friends also sign up to the same god, the likelihood that those two players will be paired up in co-op is greatly increased.

I’m just hoping it won’t take away the excitement of adventuring with complete strangers. “It was a lot to do with fan feedback,” Dark Souls II producer Takeshi Miyazoe told me during my hands-on when I asked him the reason for its inclusion. “There were a lot of requests for voice chat and friend summoning, and those more multiplayer-type features. We obviously didn’t want to put in friend summoning or voice chat throughout the whole game, but it was From Software’s unique way to take on some of the fan feedback.”

Finally, VideoGamer.com’s youtube channel has a fairly comprehensive video preview that lasts 43 minutes and focuses on the tiny details rather than the broad strokes. That kind of coverage is pretty rare outside of fan videos, so Videogamer.com deserves props for offering it.