Go look at it.” Uncertain paths, uncertain players Even the NPCs give little in the way of guidance, saying only, “Seek the King” or “There’s a forest there. Dark Souls 2, by contrast, has no clear markings of where you need to go. If you ended up at Darkroot Basin out of the Undead Burg and found yourself outclassed, it was clear why. You might not know exactly where you’re going or why, but you could rely on the environment to at least give you an idea of where you needed to be. Not just given by the map design, but also by the subtle direction every area gave players. That these needs be the case is a sad state, as one of the key selling points of the original Dark Souls was that sense of cohesion. It ceases to be a world at all, becoming merely a set of roadways that, again likely enough, end in a boss fight or two and nothing else.
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Sure, you can teleport through bonfires from the start, but when the world is, essentially, a series of spider-leg paths that have a single sunlit vertex, there’s no sense of cohesion to it. However, instead of simply walking to your next destination, you more than likely have to head back to Majula, as every path simply ends, lacking any connection to another. Instead, you start at Majula and expand outwards, upwards, sidewards, and downwards. In short, everywhere linked to everywhere else, and the world felt real, connected.ĭark Souls 2 does away with that connectivity, for the most part. Indeed, unless you wanted to take a look at the stock of those merchants that flocked to it, you needn’t have come back to Firelink even once to progress the game. Starting from Firelink Shrine, you rarely, if ever, had to visit the same location more than twice. One of the original Dark Souls’s best qualities was the cyclical nature of its world map. To that end, let’s look at why the map design of Dark Souls 2 is utter trash, and how it affects the flow of the game (trashily). Last time we discussed why the bosses make Dark Souls 2 suck, and while one aspect of a game does not a failure make, multiples certainly might.
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Rebuttals to the arguments presented here will come in future articles, but feel free to disagree in the comments below. These opinions are my own, and are informed by others as little as possible. Note: This is an article in a series dissecting the good, bad, and horrid of Dark Souls 2.
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